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BEACONSFIELD 



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DISRAELI IN 1830. 
From a sketch hy the late D. Maclise, B. A. 




DISRAELI IN 1870. 
From a sketch by Sir JoJin Gilbert. 



APPLETONS' NEW HANDY-VOLUME SERIES, r \J 



BEACOJ^SFIELD. 



BY 

y 

GEORGE MAKEPEACE TOWLE. 






KEW YOEK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

549 AlO) 551 BEOADWAY. 

1879. 



COPYRIGHT BY 

D. APPLETON & COMPAJ^Y, 

1878, 



BEACONSFIELD. 



I. 

" Me. Diseaeli," says a caustic English writer, 
" has earned a place in history. To meet him in 
the long roll of English prime-ministers is a per- 
petual surprise, like that of encountering Saul 
among the prophets. His premiership will be 
one of the standing jokes of history, as amusing 
to future students of the Victorian era as to us, 
who have had the happiness to enjoy it at first 
hand. It supplies the vein of comedy which runs 
through a momentous epoch, as the frolics of Fal- 
staff and Prince Henry lighten the intrigues and 
wars of Shakespeare's chronicle plays. 

"It is not likely to be forgotten, since what is 
great often attracts attention less than what is 
curious. Mr. Disraeli is a curious puzzle. No- 
body ever mentions his name without a smile ; 
nobody hears it without a corresponding smile. 
It awakens that sense of incongruity in the per- 
ception of which we are told that humor consists. 



4 BEACONSFIELD. 

Among the staid respectabilities of English poli- 
tics, Mr. Disraeli is Fifine at court, or turned 
duenna." 

That there is such a thing as romance in poli- 
tics, indeed, the career of him who is now Earl of 
Beaconsfield, a Knight of the Garter, and Prime- 
Minister of England, amply proves. That career 
has been a thrilling, romantic drama, with its 
" situations " and dmoHments, its coups de thed- 
tre, its plots within plots, its sudden surprises, its 
brilliant effects, its startling changes of scene, its 
maze of mystery, and its final reward of " happi- 
ness ever after," from first to last. What a con- 
trast to the lives of most statesmen has been his 
progress from the obscurity of a solicitor's cham- 
bers, and the discouraging isolation of a Jewish 
home, to the height of power and fame in the Brit- 
ish Empire ! In tracing it we find ourselves little 
worried by the dry details of figures and speech- 
es ; by mere lists of measures carried and ofiices 
attained ; by monotonous accounts of parliamen- 
tary struggles, and alternate parliamentary victo- 
ries and defeats. We are following the hero of 
an absorbing story, whose achievements are never 
dull, and who takes care never to let our interest 
flag. He prepares for us perpetual puzzles to 
solve. He springs unthought-of surprises upon 
us. He snatches unexpected triumphs from the 
very brink of humiliation, and, by a rapid succes- 
sion of bold, brilliant, audacious strokes, unravels, 



BEACfONSFIELD. 5 

like tlie consummate political magician he is, the 
most tangled webs and most bewildering knots 
of statecraft. 

He is peculiarly the picturesque figure of the 
politics of his age. The slow brain of the aver- 
age Briton, who has been accustomed to hear of 
Disraeli, and read his speeches and observe his 
statecraft, for nearly forty years, has not yet done 
wondering at the rapidity of his rise, the tenacity 
of his hold on fame and power, and the secret of 
the vast authority he wields over the great major- 
ity of his countrymen. 

Tenniel once represented Disraeli, in a strik- 
ing sketch, as the Sphinx ; and it is, perhaps, part- 
ly the Egyptian-like mystery of his character and- 
actions that has so attracted, bewildered, and fas- 
cinated the staid English people. His face is in- 
scrutable ; to this day it is hard to define exactly 
what are his opinions ; what he will do next is 
always a query upon the lips of politicians, to 
which there is no echo of an answer. 

In one respect, indeed, the romantic tinge 
which almost entirely colors Disraeli's character 
and career has been to his disadvantage. People 
are rather attracted to their picturesqueness than 
to the real results of his statesmanship. They 
are so intent upon waiting for coups cPetat and 
brilliant surprises, that they fail to credit him 
with such substantial triumphs of statesmanship 
as he has achieved. 



6 BEAGONSFIELD. 

" From the day when he filled an uncongenial 
post in a solicitor's ofiice ; from the day when he 
wrote novels and satires, which did something 
more than amuse society, which added new treas- 
ures to the literature of his country ; from the 
day when he was one of that gay throng of wits 
and fops of which he is now, alas ! almost the 
last man left to us— Disraeli's life has been one 
that deserves and will unquestionably receive the 
study and the criticism of future generations. 

"He was a man of mark before he entered 
Parliament ; he had made himself a man of mark 
—he, the obscure son of a man of the middle 
class, foredoomed to the drudgery of conveyanc- 
ing, was looked upon as a successful novelist and 
social critic, at a time when the great rival, who 
has pressed him so hard throughout his political 
career, was still a youth at Oxford." 

One great lesson of this amazing career is the 
power of unterrified audacity and indomitable 
pluck. From first to last, Disraeli has never been 
known to shrink from a bold action, to hesitate 
from timidity, to be dismayed by ridicule, to 
flinch at the prospect of defeat, or to accept dis- 
comfiture. His pertinacity and patience have at 
all times kept pace with his ambition. 

On one occasion, when he was a young man, 
on the point of entering Parliament, Disraeli was 
introduced to Lord Melbourne, then prime-minis- 
ter. That genial and indolent statesman, hand- 



BEACONSFIELD. 7 

some, rubicund, with an aristocratic, aquiline 
nose, and large blue eyes, tliat oftener twinkled 
with fun than flashed mth fire, was struck with 
his appearance, and deigned to chat with him fa- 
miliarly. Turning to him with a smile, Lord 
Melbourne said : " Well, Mr. Disraeli, what is 
your idea in entering Parliament ? What is your 
ambition ?" 

" To be Prime-Minister of England, my lord ! " 

This, from a man still very young, and only 
known as a fashionable novelist and gay fop 
about town, was the very sublimity of audacity ; 
but it was said in earnest. Here at least he made 
no secret of his towering ambition ; and the lofty 
goal which, in entering political life, he had set 
before himself, he kept in sight, and struggled 
toward, with a grit and perseverance that never 
were surpassed by any hero of history, until at 
last he attained it. 

To possess power, to wield influence — these 
seem the grand aim of his personal aspira- 
tions. Fond no doubt of pomp, glitter, title, the 
applause of senates and multitudes, the favor of 
sovereigns and the friendship of nobles and states- 
men, the circumstances and ceremony of great oc- 
casions, the outward splendors of high office, he 
has yet always valued far more the sway of his 
mind over other minds, and the authority of his 
will over other wills. 

"I am no cold-blooded philosopher," he ex- 



8 BEAOONSFIELD. 

claims in " Vivian Grey " — and in " Vivian Grey/' 
we cannot doubt, lie seeks to portray mucli of 
himself — " that would despise that for which, in 
my opinion, men — real men — should alone exist. 
Power ! Oh, what sleepless nights ! what days 
of hot anxiety ! what exertions of mind and 
body ! what travel ! what hatred ! what fierce 
encounters ! what dangers of all possible kinds, 
would I not endure with a joyous spirit to gain 
it!" 

To him, as he looked forth confidently, boldly, 
upon the difficult upward path which he was de- 
termined to pursue, and at the top of which his 
magnificent reward awaited him, it seemed that 
the way to govern mankind was " a smile for a 
friend, and a sneer for the world." 

Looking in the mirror, and observing himself 
mentally and physically, the strangely ambitious 
youth, at but little over twenty-five, thus pictured 
what he expected to be as soon as his new book 
should win for himself a place in the esteem 
of the fashionable world (he is describing the 
Prime-Minister of Sweden in "Contarini Flem- 
ing ") : 

" The moment he entered society his thought- 
ful face would break into a fascinating smile, and 
he listened with interest to the tales of levity and 
joined with readiness in each frivolous pursuit. 
He was sumptuous in his habits, and was said to 
be even voluptuary. . Perhaps he affected gallant- 



BEACONSFIELD. 9 

ry because he was deeply impressed with the in- 
fluence of women both upon public and private 
opinion. With them he was a universal favorite ; 
and, as you beheld him assenting with conviction 
to their gay or serious nonsense, and waving with 
studied grace his perfumed handkerchief in his 
delicately white and jeweled hand, you might 
have supposed him for a moment a consummate 
lord-chamberlain — ^but only for a moment, for, 
had you caught his eye, you had withdrawn your 
gaze with precipitation and perhaps with awe. 
For the rest, he spoke all languages, never lost 
his self-possession, and never displayed a spark of 
strong feeling." 

Already, while yet little more than a boy in 
age, he was a deep, observing student of the 
world around him, gauging the weaknesses of 
men and women, the foibles by which they 
might be led, the conduct which was to secure 
admiration and submission to the power of his 
genius. The motto which he placed on the title- 
page of "Vivian Grey" was that by which, 
through life, he has guided his acts and his ambi- 
tion : 

" "Why, then, the world's mine oyster, 
Which I with sword will open." 

What has added immensely to the romance 
of this once obscure young man, meditating in 
the solitude of Bloomsbury the capture of society, 



10 BEACONSFIELD. 

party, and power, has been the conspicuously 
Oriental quality of Disraeli's character, tenden- 
cies, and methods. He has been all the time a 
magician from the East, conjuring amid the 
broad-cloth civilization of the West. Proud to 
excess of the ancient race whence he sprang, he 
has derived from it a glowing imagination, a 
fondness for the majesty and glory of effect, a 
love of successes that are palpable, material, and 
brillianl^. 

To make the queen Empress of India was a 
masterpiece of Oriental inspiration and display.. 

It has been the result of a consummate art, 
that this dreamer of Jewish greatness in the past, 
and of Jewish glory in time to come, has been 
able to mould the public opinion of the most pro- 
saic and practical people of Europe to his sover- 
eign will. He has almost constantly, indeed, ap- 
peared in a dual character. ]N"o man could be 
more English in his obstinate adherence to tradi- 
tion, in his assertion of " a spirited foreign pol- 
icy," in his devotion to the Established Church, 
in his sympathies with land, custom, and privilege. 
Yet, with all this, he has retained the full meas- 
ure of his Oriental inspirations and enthusiasms, 
and for the most part has appeared apart and 
solitary, like one who was essentially separated by 
instinct, feeling, and thought, from those by whom 
he was surrounded. 

It is surely one of the marvels of this age 



BEACONSFIELD. H 

that he who declared, years ago, that " the slum- 
ber of the East is more vital than the waking life 
of the rest of the globe ; " who, by the mouth of 
one of his heroes, said that it is only in Palestine 
that " the Creator of the world speaks with men; " 
who speaks of the " Venetian origin of the Brit- 
ish Constitution ; " who has for forty years taken 
every occasion to vaunt the superiority of the 
Jewish over the Saxon race, and who once told a 
nobleman of ancient descent that his (Disraeli's) 
ancestors were great when the noble lord's ances- 
tors were hinds and robbers, should have so com- 
pletely conquered the English mind and heart as 
to rule the empire for years with unquestioned 
and unchallenged power ! 



II. 



In one respect, certainly, Disraeli is a "self- 
made man." The son of Jews, bearing upon his 
countenance and in his very name the indelible 
stamp of his Hebrew origin, and having rooted 
in his soul, and inevitably betraying by his mouth, 
Hebrew ideas and traits, without great fortune, 
forbidden by birth and blood the entree into high 
society, it was far more difficult for him to con- 
quer the deep and ancient prejudices of English- 
men, and to rise to be their virtual ruler, than for 



13 BEACONSFIELD. 

the little-educated son of an American farmer, 
like Jackson, a rail-splitter, like Lincoln, or a 
tailor, like Andrew Johnson, to reach the presi- 
dency. 

Lord Truro, the son of a tradesman, was Lord 
High Chancellor, and married a cousin of the 
queen. Lord Tenterden, the son of a barber, be- 
came Lord Chief-Justice of the King's Bench. 
William H. Smith, once a newsboy, is First Lord 
of the Admiralty, and will, no doubt, be a peer. 
But these only had to overcome poverty, and to 
struggle forward. Englishmen with Englishmen, 
to the height that their talents and virtues merited. 

Disraeli was heavy-weighted from the first, 
with a burden from which no amount of wealth 
could relieve him, and which no exhibition of 
genius, however brilliant, could wholly put out 
of sight. He made a prime-minister out of a 
Jew, an earl out of a dandy, and a Knight of the 
Garter out of a young radical whose first essay in 
Parliament brought down upon him the crushing 
ddicule of nearly every man who heard him. 

But George Eliot, in one of her stories, has 
said that a man of genius can only be accurately 
estimated by knowing something about his pro- 
genitors. While Disraeli has done much toward 
" making " himself, he in fact inherited pure and 
gentle blood ; and derived, without doubt, from 
his Hebrew ancestors, the germs of the genius of 
which he has made such conspicuous use. 



BEACONSFIELD. 13 

Right proudly he has told the world that 
there are Jews and Jews ; that of all the Jewish 
castes, that of the Sephardim is the only caste 
extant which can boast of gentle blood in all its 
generations to the present time ; and that among 
the few Sephardim still left on earth to maintain 
the dignity and honor of their descent, is com- 
prised his own family. 

The Disraelis have been, in succession, Span- 
ish Jews, Italian Jews, and English Jews ; and, 
like Jews, they have been a race of wanderers. 
Four centuries ago they were settled in Spain, 
thriving as they could in trade, but much har- 
assed, like all their brethren, by the proceedings 
of the Holy Inquisition, which reserved its most 
persistent persecutions and choicest tortures for 
the people of Israel. At last one of them, having 
his peril of the rack and the branding-iron visibly 
brought home to him by the martyrdom of one 
of his friends, gathered up his goods, and, after 
many dangers and troubles, succeeded in escap- 
ing to the then hospitable shores of the powerful 
and flourishing Venetian Republic. 

Hitherto, the family had borne another name ; 
but the pious emigrant, who had thus fled from 
the terrors of the Inquisition, now commemorated 
that happy deliverance by assuming a new and 
significant cognomen. " Grateful to the God of 
Israel," says his famous descendant, "who had 
sustained them through unprecedented trials, and 



14 BEACONSFIELD. 

guarded them througli unheard-of perils, lie as- 
sumed the name of Disraeli, a name never borne 
before or since by any other family, in order that 
their race might be forever recognized." 

For two centuries the Disraelis lived and 
traded in peace under the then potent protection 
of the lion of St. Mark ; not acquiring wealth, 
indeed, as many Jews of their time did, but toil- 
ing patiently on and living in comfort, and at 
least assured of life and liberty. 

Finally Benjamin, the grandfather of Lord 
Beaconsfield, a more enterprising trader than his 
fathers, a shrewd young fellow, who heard won- 
derful stories of the ease with which fortunes 
were to be made in London, and how the Jews 
had begun to receive some installment of the 
much-vaunted British freedom ; like all his race, 
moreover, not averse to adventure and wander- 
ing, emigrated from his soft native climate and 
repaired to the foggy capital of the north, where 
he settled down, and plodded thenceforth to the 
end of his mortal career. 

Step by step he rose until he became, first a 
merchant of good repute for honesty and thrift, 
then a well-to-do citizen ; and having attained 
this position, toward middle life he got married. 

It is a pleasing picture that the grandson 
gives of his existence, after having made a for- 
tune and a good name. 

" He settled near Enfield," we are told, " where 



BEACONSFIELD. 15 

he formed an Italian garden, entertained his 
friends, played whist with Sir Horace Mann, who 
was his great acquaintance, and who had known 
his brother at Venice as a banker, ate macaroni 
which was dressed by the Venetian consul, sang 
canzonettas ; and, notwithstanding a wife who 
never pardoned him his name, and a son who dis- 
appointed all his plans, and who to the last hour 
of his life was an enigma to him, lived till he 
was nearly ninety, and then died, in 1817, in the 
full enjoyment of prolonged existence." 

The old man must, indeed, have been much 
tortured by the contempt with which his wife, 
herself a Jewess, regarded his name and race. 
She was seemingly a proud woman, who craved 
good society, and was " so mortified by her social 
position, that she lived until eighty without in- 
dulging a tender expression." 

Disraeli, while he has inherited some of his 
grandfather's most salient traits — for the latter 
was " a man of ardent character, sanguine, cou- 
rageous, speculative, fortunate, with a temper 
which no disappointment could disturb, and a 
brain, amid reverses, full of resource " — certainly 
did not derive from his grandmother her dislike 
of her Jewish blood, and her detestation of the 
ancient name. 

She exhausted every art of persuasion in try- 
ing to induce Benjamin the elder to abandon his 
ancestral faith, and to embrace the tenets of the 



16 BEACONSFIELD. 

English Church ; but in this she did not succeed. 
It is evident, indeed, that she was by no means 
the mistress of her husband's will ; for their only- 
child was named Isaac, as if to still preserve in 
the family at least the Jewish memories of which 
he was so proud. This Isaac was " the very op- 
posite of his father ; a timid recluse, living among 
his books, simple as Goldsmith, and learned as a 
grammarian of the middle ages. His birth left 
him without relations or family acquaintance." 

According to his son, Isaac Disraeli " not only 
never entered into the politics of the day, but he 
could never understand them. He never was con- 
nected with any body or set of men, comrades 
of school or college, or confederates in that pub- 
lic life which, in England, is perhaps the only 
foundation of real friendship." 

He began life by shocking his mercantile fa- 
ther with his enthusiasm for Rousseau, his abhor- 
rence of trade, and his penchant for books, to 
which he took early, and to which he clung as 
long as life lasted. 

" He was a complete literary character, a man 
who really passed his life in a library. Even 
marriage produced no change in these habits. He 
rose early to enter the chamber where he lived 
alone with his books, and at night his lamp was ever 
lit in the same walls. He disliked business, and 
he never required relaxation ; he was absorbed in 
his pursuits. In London his only amusement was 



BEACONSFIELD. 17 

to ramble among booksellers ; if he entered a club 
it was only to go into the library. In the coun- 
try he scarcely ever left his room but to saunter 
in abstraction upon a terrace, muse over a chap- 
ter, or coin a sentence. He had not a single pas- 
sion or prejudice." 

He became, and continued through life indeed, 
as dry and incorrigible an antiquarian, as diligent 
a plodder among old tomes and manuscripts, vel- 
lum-bound volumes and worm-eaten memoirs, as 
the veriest Dryasdust that Oxford or Cambridge 
contained in its cloisters. 

But he was not dumb, gathering and not giv- 
ing forth again. He published his chit-chat of 
literary learning, and from his pen came, perhaps, 
the quaintest books of the age in which he lived. 
He told the world all about authors and the per- 
sonal lore of letters ; pictured the habits, foibles, 
eccentricities, the " curiosities," " amenities," and 
" quarrels," of the genius irritahile. In fact, he 
was the master of ceremonies of literature. His 
books are not only still extant, but read and 
quoted ; few libraries are without them ; and if 
you will look into a copy of them, a portrait of 
the genial old man, grown old, but still with a 
round, cheerful, shining, and unmistakably Jewish 
face, huge round spectacles upon his nose, having 
the air rather of a social good liver than of a plod- 
der in the gossip of literature, will look out upon 
you from the frontispiece. 
2 



18 BEACONSFIELD. 

Isaac Disraeli, flourisliing in ample competence^ 
from the fair fortune left by his father, and the 
goodly royalties that flowed in from the sale of 
his books, lived to a green old age, gratified by 
the friendship of many of the literary lights whom 
he held in so healthy an awe and respect, and 
surviving long enough to rejoice in the rising 
promise of his son's genius. 

In religious matters, Isaac, who was really a 
believer in Rousseau and Voltaire, was indifferent 
to his sect, and though he caused his little son 
Benjamin, at an early age, to " be received into 
the covenant of Abraham," he ended by causing 
his own name to be erased from the list of the 
contributing members of the synagogue. 

When Benjamin had reached the age of twelve, 
the poet Rogers, it is said, induced Isaac to con- 
sent that the boy should be baptized in the Church 
of England ; and this actually took place at St. 
Andrew's, Holborn, July 31, 1817. 

The early homes of Benjamin Disraeli are thus 
described : 

" The house at Enfield seems to have been given 
up at an early date. Isaac Disraeli was one of the 
most constant frequenters of the British Museum ; 
and, for convenience of access, took a house, in or 
about 1809, in the King's Road, Gray's Inn, then 
an almost rural spot, and very different from the 
crowded locality it has since become. Later on,, 
in 1825, he removed to an estate which he had 



BEACONSFIELD. 19 

bought at Bradenliam, in Bucks, and with that 
event commenced the connection of his illustri- 
ous son with the county which he has so aptly- 
designated Hhe county of statesmen.' From 
Bradenham House the prefaces to the early 
works and election addresses of the younger Dis- 
raeli were regularly dated, the removal to Hugh- 
enden Manor not occurring till after his mar- 
riage." 

From his grandfather, then, Disraeli inherited 
his pluck, his ardor, his courage and hopefulness, 
his resource amid reverses, and his indomitable 
serenity of temper ; from his father, that ardent 
love of books and letters which inspired his early 
triumphs, and which has lent grace and force to 
his oratorical career. 

But to one of his saMguiae and social tempera- 
ment, his home must have been dull and tedious. 
" Reared in a home of as absolute seclusion from 
English society as if it had been placed in an island 
of the Mediterranean, with occasional glimpses, 
perhaps, at Enfield, of a strange society, more for- 
eign than English, and more cosmopolitan than 
either, the young Disraeli must early have felt 
that strange sense of moral detachment from the 
nation in which he has lived, and in which he has 
attained the highest place, which is visible in his 
■writings and his career. In both homes, he must 
soon have learned that his name and race placed 
a certain barrier between him and the distinctions 



20 BEACONSFIELD. 

to which he aspired. They set him apart. He 
was outside the English world." 

The obstacles before him, however, were only 
so many victories to be won ; and in the struggle 
and conflict he found a thrilling and happy ex- 
citement. 

Isaac Disraeli was at least not too absorbed in 
his tomes to discern early his boy's precocious 
talent. He bestowed the greatest pains upon his 
education ; sent him for a while to school at 
Winchester and Walthamstowe ; infused into him 
his own keen love of literature and literary pur- 
suits ; saw with exceeding joy Benjamin's sunny 
and elastic temperament ; hoped for a moment 
that he might make a great lawyer of him, and 
put him to drudgery in a solicitor's office — drud- 
gery which the mercurial youth detested from the 
first, and got rid of as soon as he could ; then, 
despairing of his success in this direction, good- 
naturedly allowing Benjamin to follow his own 
erratic bent, and make his way, if he could, with 
a tyro's pen. 



III. 



One day, suddenly, " Vivian Grey " burst upon 
astonished society, and took it by storm. It found 
its way at once to every drawing-room table. It 



BEACONSFIELD. 21 

was the town talk at ministerial soirees, in the 
lobbies of the House of Commons, at the Pall Mall 
clubs. Great ladies asked each other if they had 
read it ; wondered who wrote it ; guessed whom 
the author meant to represent as the Marquis of 
Carabas, and Lord Courtown, and Mr. Cleveland ; 
and who was Vivian Grey himself. 

It was a bulky book, in no less than five vol- 
umes ; yet the first edition went off before the 
publishers could issue a second ; those who could 
not afford to purchase it flocked to the circulating 
libraries to borrow it. 

It was " a fashionable novel," and gave strange- 
ly vivid pictures of high life, not without many a 
sneer and sarcasm at high life's foibles, and boldly 
professing to portray some of the leaders of poli- 
tics and fashion under the thin disguise of ficti- 
tious names. It was full of sounding maxims and 
hot tirades ; and it sang loud paeans in praise of 
power and authority. 

Aristocratic critics pounced upon it, and de- 
clared the picture " impudently false and out- 
rageously absurd." People spoke of it as a strange 
jumble of radical politics, fashionable chit-chat, 
and original thought. 

Then it leaked out that the author was not yet 
twenty, and that he was that black-eyed, curly- 
headed, flashily-dressed little Jew, the son of old 
Disraeli, the bookworm. 

Disraeli had made his plunge for the pearl of 



22 BEACONSFIELD. 

literary fame, and liad grasped it. In the musty 
purlieu of the solicitor's office, instead of drawing 
deeds of settlement and droning over authorities 
on " mortmain," lie had been feverishly plying his 
pen over his first novel ; had issued it, and it had 
made " a hit." 

It is said that, thus early, he had already con- 
ceived the singular and original idea of mounting 
in politics by a literary ladder. Addison had 
risen to the secretaryship of state by the " Spec- 
tator ; " Mat Prior had won a place in diplomacy ; 
Sheridan had graduated from "The School for 
Scandal " into the rank and fame of a great par- 
liamentary orator ; Canning, in his own time, had 
owed his earlier political progress to his pen. But 
it was a new notion to make way in politics by 
establishing a reputation as a fashionable novelist. 
The result proved that it was as successful as it 
was bold and unheard-of. 

The hero of "Vivian Grey " is "a fast young 
man in upper-class life — a brilliant, fashionable, 
clever, sardonic, heartless, ambitious youth — pos- 
sessed by an ardent craving for political intrigue, 
and a keen desire for fame and power, to achieve 
which he has no scruple about the means, employ- 
ing tricks, falsities, and grand coups de theatre, 
provided these will serve his purpose." 

So immensely popular was it that not long 
after it was published a " Key to Vivian Grey " 
was issued, and ran through no less than ten edi- 



BEACONSFIELD. 23 

tions within a year. Then was it divulged to the 
world whom the characters were really intended to 
portray, over which the fashionable folk had been 
torturing their brains for months. 

" The studious father of the hero, who never 
interfered in politics, and who ' hopes the urchin 
will never scribble,' is, of course, sketched from 
Isaac Disraeli ; while the son, educated at a pri- 
vate school, and full of wit and cleverness, is also 
undoubtedly designed, in the elements of his char- 
acter, for the author himself." 

In the crowd of figures who appear and disap- 
pear in the pages of the story, we are able — ^thanks 
to the " key " — to discern many of the most cele- 
brated wits, politicians, and great ladies of the 
era of " Gentleman George." Lord Brougham 
struts and fumes as " Mr. Foaming Fudge ; " the 
proud but dissolute Marquis of Clanricarde found 
himself odiously caricatured as Carabas, whose 
traits are really one of the chief satires of the 
book ; that stout old Tory, Lord Eldon, poses as 
" Lord Past Century ; " Mr. Canning is merciless- 
ly ridiculed as " Mr. Charlatan Gas ; " Mrs. Coutts 
is easily recognized under the pseudonym of " Mrs. 
Million ; " Theodore Hook is pleasantly parodied 
as " Stanislaus Hoax ; " Prince Esterhazy is seen 
as " Prince Hungary ; " Lady Caroline Lamb re- 
ceives the name of " Mrs. Felix Lorraine ; " in 
" Prince Little Lilliput " it is not difficult to iden- 
tify Prince Leopold, the uncle of the future queen. 



24 BEACONSFIELD. 

and afterward the wise and sagacious King of the 
Belgians ; the sumptuous Marquis of Hertford, 
whose revels in Regent's Park were then a scandal 
even to a scandal-loving court, appears thinly dis- 
guised as " Marquis of Grandgout ; " and Prince 
Metternich, Austria's famous diplomat, masquer- 
ades as " Beckendorf." 

" Vivian Grey," in short, was conceived and 
executed with the ambitious intent to capture a 
reputation ; and so consummate was its art, so full 
was it of thought, and wit, of vivacious conversa- 
tion, so replete with incident, so charged with dar- 
ing sarcasm, original, sparkling, and coherent, that 
at one bound the young author rose to fame. 
The admixture of the politics of the day was a 
surprise ; the audacious delineation of men and 
women actually living and in high places took 
away the breath of the hon ton ; the strange and 
radical doctrines, insidiously smuggled into the 
very midst of the fashionable world, such as had 
once before invaded another fashionable world, in 
France, at the court of Louis XVI., just before the 
Revolution : all these were so many shrewd strokes 
to catch the public ear, and to set everybody to 
wondering and guessing, to denouncing or prais- 
ing or laughing at "Vivian Grey." 



BEACONSFIELD. 25 



IV. 

To "Disraeli tlie younger," as, witli filial 
loyalty and sometliing, perhaps, of affectation, 
he began to style himself, " Vivian Grey " was an 
" open sesame " to high society. At first, people 
stared and half sneered at this demi-plebeian 
young Jew who could write such startling things ; 
they did not more than half like him, though he 
had so glib a tongue, such fine conversational wit, 
and bore so graceful and easy a carriage in well- 
bred circles. 

Yet, he became the " fashion." He began to 
appear, in gorgeous attire, and with all the self- 
composure of an experienced man of the world, 
in the much-frequented salons of those social 
leaders who prided themselves on cultivating and 
displaying the lions of the day. Everywhere he 
went, he was the subject of admiring glances, and 
the centre of interested groups. He saw with 
joyous pride that his intellectual brilliancy was 
confessed ; nor, perhaps, was he chagrined to ob- 
serve that the confession had been extorted in- 
stead of freely given. 

To elbow dukes descended from the Conquest, 
gartered earls and powerful ministers, popular 
poets and famous men of wit and fashion, to be 
listened to with pleased attention by the belles 
and beauties of the West End, to evoke the 



26 BEACONSFIELD. 

laughter of brilliant companies by the sparkle of 
his sallies and the sting of his satires, to find his 
table covered with coroneted invitations, to be 
sought for at all the social festivities and lit- 
erary reunions of patrician London, was indeed 
a triumph to the recently obscure student of 
the law, and still almost beardless youth, in 
which he did not care to conceal his pride and 
delight. 

It was a dazzling change, indeed, from the 
dull monotony of Bloomsbury to the unceasing 
gayety and movement of the West End ; and 
" Disraeli the younger " drank freely and deeply 
of the draught of reputation and popularity he 
had won. 

He bloomed forth, not only as a wit, but as a 
dandy of dandies, a gallant, and a man of the 
world. In dress, like a true Jew that he was, he 
was ostentatious and conspicuous almost to vul- 
garity. He joined clubs, frequented the stalls and 
coulisses of the opera, paid his devotions to the 
coquettish beauties of the day, rode in the park 
at fashionable hours, and, wherever it was "the 
thing " to show himself, there he was. 

From one fashionable resort, in particular, he 
was almost never absent. No sooner had he ap- 
peared as a successful novelist than he attracted 
the attention and won the favor and friendship 
of the famous Countess of Blessington. 

Lady Blessington occupied a somewhat pecu- 



BEACONSFIELD. 27 

liar position in London society. Of low birth and 
Irish parentage, and with a not wholly unsullied 
reputation, this fascinating and brilliant woman 
had married, in his old age, the Earl of Blessing- 
ton, who at once gave her, by reason of his rank 
and wealth, a conspicuous social position. Of 
this she availed herself to the utmost. She was 
ambitious, lively, witty, strikingly handsome, en- 
gaging, thoroughly good-natured, and lavishly 
hospitable ; and her aspirations were speedily re- 
warded by her achieving an unquestioned place as 
a leader of fashion. 

She did not, indeed, move in the highest cir- 
cles of the nobility and the court ; yet great no- 
bles and courtiers frequented her mansion. Gore 
House. She loved, especially, to surround herself 
with young and rising literary genius ; and her 
salons were almost nightly crowded by young 
poets, novelists, and politicians. 

After Lord Blessington's death, her son-in-law, 
Count d'Orsay, " the most splendid specimen of a 
man," says I:^, P. Willis, " and well dressed one, 
that I have ever seen," resided with her, and most 
effectively aided her in dispensing the brilliant 
hospitalities of Gore House. 

Lady Blessington is graphically described by 
Willis as being forty when he saw her, but look- 
ing " something on the sunny side of thirty. Her 
person is full, but preserves all the fineness of an 
admirable shape ; her foot is not crowded in a 



28 BEACONSFIELD. 

fashionable slipper, and lier complexion is even of 
a girlish delicacy and freshness. Her dress of 
bine satin was cut low and folded across her 
bosom, in a way to show to advantage the round 
and sculpture-like curve and whiteness of a pair 
of exquisite shoulders ; while her hair, dressed 
close to her head, and parted simply on her fore- 
head with a xiGhferronni^re of turquoise, enveloped 
in clear outline a head with which it would be 
difficult to find a fault. Her features are regular, 
and her mouth, the most expressive of them, has 
a full ripeness and freedom of play, peculiar to 
the Irish physiognomy, and expressive of the 
most unsuspicious good humor. Add to all this a 
voice merry and sad by turns, but always musical, 
and manners of the most unpretending elegance, 
yet even more remarkable for their winning kind- 
ness, and you have the most prominent traits of 
one of the most lovely and fascinating women I 
have ever seen." 

Such was the friend that Disraeli won at the 
outset of his society career, and who adhered to 
him warmly as long as she lived, praising him and 
petting him without stint, and eagerly defending 
him from the sneers of his rivals and the sarcasms 
of his enemies. 

One who is still living, and who had the privi- 
lege of frequenting Lady Blessington's drawing- 
rooms when Disraeli was one of its young lions, 
thus charmingly describes that celebrated resort 



BEACONSFIELD. 29 

of London celebrities and wits, and Disraeli him- 
self as he appeared there : 

" It is the height of the London season some 
forty years since, and we are standing in a long 
library in Lady Blessington's mansion in Seamore 
Place, whose sides are alternately covered with 
rows of magnificently-bound books and gorgeous- 
ly-framed mirrors. The window, which is deep 
and runs the entire breadth of the room, opens 
upon Hyde Park. We have before us a letter, 
written by a gentleman at the time, describing his 
introduction to Lady Blessington in this very 
room, and from that letter we will venture to 
quote : 

" * The picture to my eye as the door opened 
was a very lovely one : a woman of remarkable 
beauty, half buried in a fauteuil of yellow satin, 
reading by a magnificent lamp suspended from 
the centre of the arched ceiling ; sofas, couch33, 
ottomans, and busts, arranged in rather a crowded 
sumptuousness through the room ; grand tables 
covered with expensive and elegant trifles in every 
corner; and a delicate white hand, relieved on the 
back of a book, to which the eye was attracted by 
the blaze of its diamond rings. As the servant 
mentioned my name, she rose and gave me her 
hand very cordially, and, a gentleman entering 
immediately afterward, she presented me to Count 
d^Orsay, the well-known Pelham of London.' 
" There was no other room in Europe which 



30 BEACONSFIELD. 

could boast of witnessing more brilliant reunions 
tban those wliicli were tben in the habit of fre- 
quently assembling in that library in Seamore 
Place. The salon glitters with stars, and is re- 
splendent with orders of every kind. ISTot a na- 
tion of the civilized world is without its repre- 
sentative. There are foreign counts, who have 
achieved eminence, and who speak every European 
language ; attaches^ embassadors, and princes. 

"There stands the greatest capitalist in the 
world, the original, possibly, of Sidonia of *Con- 
ingsby ' fame ; and there, in groups at intervals 
round the apartment, are met together all that is 
most eminent in every possible department and 
kind of excellence and skill in England. 

"Mr. Lytton Bulwer, who has just won his 
spurs by his novel 'Pelham,' enters with an at- 
tractive frankness, and is received with empresse- 
ment by the noble hostess. That speaker yonder 
with the merry eye and the Bacchus head is Tom 
Moore, criticising the personnel of the English 
House of Commons, and discussing the condition 
of Ireland. ' The great period of Ireland's glory,' 
you may hear him say, ' was between '82 and '98, 
and it was a time when a man almost lived with 
a pistol in his hand.' 

" A volley of well-bred laughter draws your at- 
tention to another portion of the room ; you look 
up and you see Theodore Hook, the Lucian Gay 
of ^Coningsby,' with his hand on Lord Canter- 



BEACONSFIELD. 31 

bury's sleeve, narrating the incidents of the last 
practical joke, or expatiating upon the theme of 
some new political squib for the Mcaminer. 

"A little bit to the left you have Horace 
Smith, one of the authors of * Rejected Addresses,' 
playing rather an aside in the conversation, in- 
terpolating a pun or a witticism whenever he gets 
a chance, but more a listener than a talker. There 
is a famous traveler just returned from Constanti- 
nople ; and there, Henry Bulwer (the late Lord 
Dalling) discussing with great earnestness the last 
speech of Daniel O'Connell. 

"Scattered about the room are such men as 
Lord Lyndhurst, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Strang- 
f ord. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Henry Luttrell — the 
' wit among lords, and the lord among wits ' — the 
Hon. W. R. Spencer, and Captain Marryat. 

" Two persons of different ages and different 
api)earance, indeed, yet not without a strong mu- 
tual resemblance of feature, enter, and remind us, 
by the announcement of their names, that we have 
already delayed too long over the preliminaries 
of the subject of this article. 

" The pair are Mr. Disraeli the elder and Mr. 
Disraeli the younger ; and Lady Blessington re- 
ceives them both with conspicuous welcome. 

" It was only the other day that her ladyship 
was mentioning to a visitor how delightful it was 
to witness the old man's pride in his clever young 
son, and the son's respect and affection for his 



3^ BEACONSFIELD. 

father. Mr. Disraeli plre is just now engaged in 
collecting materials for an exceedingly elaborate 
and comprehensive * History of English Litera- 
ture,' one of those books, unfortunately, which 
are destined never to advance beyond the stage 
of design. 

" Mr. Disraeli fils^ Disraeli ' the younger,' as 
you may read on the title-page of his new and 
soon to be issued volume, has lately made a 
triumphantly successful debut in the arena of au- 
thorship. ' Vivian Grey ' is the talk of the town. 
Who is the Marquis of Carabas ? Can it be pos- 
sible that Lord Courtown is really Sir ? And 

then, who are all the German duchy celebrities ? 
And if it comes to that, who is Yivian Grey 
himself ? These are questions which sapient Lon- 
don is asking itself, and every day rejecting an- 
swers by the score, or framing new ones which 
are certain to meet a similar destiny of repudia- 
tion to-morrow. 

"Just at this moment we will not puzzle our- 
selves with the interrogations as to who Mr. Vi- 
vian Grey is or is not ; we may as well occupy 
ourselves with taking some personal observations 
as to the creator of Mr. Vivian Grey. And there 
he stands — * Disraeli the younger,' He has taken 
up his position in front of the hostess's mantel- 
piece, and you may note the clever young man at 
your leisure. 

" Every one is looking at him to-night ; for 



BEACONSFIELD. 33 

Mr. Benjamin Disraeli has made a sensation, and 
sensation is what society loves, and of whose au- 
thor it invariably makes a hero. It is possible 
that if we were to project ourselves somewhat for- 
ward in the course of time, and to glance at the 
costume of Mr. Benjamin Disraeli by the light of 
some ridiculously-advanced date in the world's 
history, say a. d. 1878, if our island is not by 
that time sunk deep in the sea's profound, we 
should pronounce it a trifle peculiar, antiquated 
perhaps. 

" The coat is the coat of any ordinary civilian 
of the times, but not the waistcoat — a marvelous 
vest, in truth, gleaming in the wax-lights with its 
splendid embroidery of gorgeous gold flowers. 
Add to these, patent-leather pumps, a white stick 
with a black cord and tassel, and a mysterious 
complication of gold chains in the region of his 
neck and pockets — and you have a faithful pic- 
ture of Disraeli the younger, author of 'Vivian 
Grey' and 'Contarini Fleming, a Psychological 
Autobiography.' " 



Lady Blessii^gtoi^, sitting in her luxurious 
drawing-room in 1835, and chatting in her cor- 
dial, enthusiastic, whole-souled way with her new 
3 



^4: BEAOONSFIELD. 

American acquaintance, IsT. P. Willis, is talking 
of literary people, and asks him : 

" Do you know the Disraelis in America ? " 

"We do, indeed; 'Curiosities of Literature,' 
by the father, and ' Vivian Grey,' by the son, are 
universally known." 

"I am pleased at that, too, for I like them 
both. Disraeli the elder, with his son, came here 
the other night. It would have delighted you to 
see the old man's pride in him. He is very fond 
of him, and as he was going away, he patted him 
on the head, and said to me, 'Take care of him. 
Lady Blessington, for my sake. He is a clever 
lad, but he wants ballast. I am glad he has the 
honor to know you, for you will check him some- 
times when I am away.' Disraeli the elder lives 
in the country, about twenty miles from town, 
and seldom comes up to London. He is a very 
plain old man in his manners, as plain as his son 
is the reverse. Disraeli the younger is quite his 
own character of Vivian Grey, crowded with tal- 
ent, but very soigneux of his curls, and a bit of a 
coxcomb. There is no reserve about him, how- 
ever, and he is the onlj Joyous dandy I ever saw." 

The American looker-on in London was soon, 
thanks to Lady Blessington's hospitality, to have 
an opportunity to judge of the brilliant young au- 
thor and fop for himself. 

" I dined," he says, " at Lady Blessington's, in 
company with several authors, three or four noble- 



BEACONSFIELD. 35 

men, and an exquisite or two. The authors were 
Bulwer, the novelist, and his brother, the statist ; 
Proctor (better known as ' Barry Cornwall ') ; Dis- 
raeli, the author of ' Vivian Grey ; ' and Fon- 
blanque, of the Examiner. The principal noble- 
man was the Earl of Durham, and the prin- 
cipal exquisite (though the word scarcely ap- 
plies to the magnificent scale on which Nature 
made him, and on which he made himself) was 
Count d'Orsay. There were plates for twelve. 

" Disraeli had arrived before me, and sat in the 
deep window, looking out upon Hyde Park, with 
the last rays of daylight reflected from the gor- 
geous gold flowers of a splendidly embroidered 
waistcoat. 

" Disraeli has one of the most remarkable faces 
I ever saw. He is lividly pale, and but for the 
energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, 
would seem a victim to consumption. His eye 
is as black as Erebus, and has the most mock- 
ing, lying-in-wait sort of expression conceivable. 
His mouth is alive with a kind of working and 
impatient nervousness, and when he bursts forth, 
as he does constantly, with a partially successful 
cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of tri- 
umphant scorn that would be worthy of a Mephis- 
topheles. His hair is as extraordinary as his taste 
in waistcoats. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black 
ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his col- 
larless stock, while on the right temple it is parted 



36 BEACONSFIELD. 

and put away with the smooth carelessness of a 
girl's, and shines most unctuously 

'With thy incomparable oil, Macassar ! ' " 

The conversation on this occasion turned on 
new books, and a volume on Italy by Beckford, 
the friend of Byron, who " has luxuriated in every 
country with the fancy of a poet and the refined 
splendor of a Sybarite," was vivaciously dis- 
cussed. 

" Disraeli was the only one at the table who 
knew him, and the style in which he gave a sketch 
of his habits and manners was worthy of himself. 
I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of 
the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary 
language in which he clothed his- description. 
There were, at least, five words in every sentence 
that must have been very much astonished at the 
use they were put to, and yet no others, apparent- 
ly, could so well have conveyed his idea. Dis- 
raeli talked like a race-horse approaching the win- 
ning-post, every muscle in action, and the utmost 
energy of expression flung out in every burst. It 
is a great pity he is not in Parliament. It ap- 
peared, from Disraeli's account, that Beckford is 
a splendid egotist, determined to free life as much 
as possible from its usual fetters, and to enjoy it 
to the highest degree of which his genius, backed 
by an immense fortune, is capable." 

From Beckford the chit-chat passed to Yic- 



BEACONSFIELD. 37 

tor Hugo, then looming up brilliantly as novelist, 
dramatist, and poet. This awoke Disraeli's en- 
thusiasm, and, " fired with his own eloquence, he 
started off, dpropos de hottes, with a long story of 
impalement he had seen in Upper Egypt. It was 
as good, and perhaps as authentic, as the descrip- 
tion of the chow-chow-tow in ' Vivian Grey.' He 
had arrived from Cairo on the third day after the 
man was transfixed by two stakes from hip to 
shoulder, and he was still alive ! Then followed 
the sufferer's history, with a score of murders and 
barbarities, heaped together like Martin's 'Feast 
of Belshazzar,' with a mixture of horror and splen- 
dor, that was un]3aralleled in my experience of 
improvisation. No mystic priest of the Cory- 
bantes could have worked himself up into a finer 
frenzy of language." 

When the ladies retired from the dining-room, 
and the gentlemen were left to themselves with 
their champagne and port, the talk turned, as it is 
quite apt to do, on the politics of the day. Dan- 
iel O'Connell was then a very conspicuous figure 
in the House. 

" Disraeli's lips were playing on the edge of a 
champagne glass, which he had just drained, and 
off he shot again, with a description of an inter- 
view he had had with the agitator the day before, 
ending in a story of an Irish di*agoon who was 
killed in the Peninsula. His name was Sarsfield. 
Disraeli told how his arm was shot off, and he was 



38 BEACONSFIELD. 

bleeding to death. When told that he couM not 
live, he called for a large silver goblet, out of 
which he usually drank his claret. He held it to 
the gushing artery and filled it to the brim with 
blood, looked at it a moment, turned it out slowly 
upon the ground, muttered to himself, ^If that 
had been shed for old Ireland ! ' and expired. 
You can have no idea how thrillingly this little 
story was told. Fonblanque, however, who is a 
cold political satirist, could see nothing in a man's 
* decanting his claret ' that was in the least sub- 
lime, and so Vivian Grey got into a passion, 
and for a while was silent. 

"Slidell, the American, was spoken of, when 
Disraeli cried out, ' Slidell ! I owe him two-pence, 
by Jove ! ' And he went on to relate how, sitting 
next to Mr. Slidell at a bull-fight at Seville, he 
wanted to buy a fan to keep off the flies, and hav- 
ing nothing but doubloons in his pocket, Mr. Sli- 
dell lent him a small Spanish coin to that value, 
which he owed him to this day. 

^^ Apj^opos to this, Disraeli gave a description, 
in a gorgeous, burlesque, galloping style, of a 
Spanish bull-fight ; and when we were nearly dead 
with laughing, some one made a move, and we 
went up to Lady Blessington in the drawing-room. 
Lord Durham requested her ladyship to introduce 
him particularly to Disraeli — the effect of his elo- 
quence." 

On another occasion, at Lady Blessington's, 



BEACONSFIELD. 39 

Disraeli made " a splendid defense " of Tom 
Moore's indifference to criticism ; and in tlie 
course of a brilliant conversation "flared up," 
as a dandy would say, " immediately," on the sub- 
ject of Platonism. 

"His wild, black eyes glistened, and his ner- 
vous lips quivered and poured out eloquence ; and 
a German professor, who had entered late, and the 
Russian charg^ cVaffaires, who had entered later, 
and a whole ottomanful of noble exquisites, lis- 
tened with wonder. Disraeli gave us an account 
of Taylor, almost the last of the celebrated Plato- 
nists, who worshiped Jupiter in a back parlor in 
London a few years ago, with undoubted sincerity. 
He had an altar, Disraeli said, and a brazen figure 
of the Thunderer, and performed his devotions 
as regularly as the most pious sacerdos of the 
ancients. In his old age he was turned out of the 
lodgings he had occupied for a great number of 
years, and went to a friend in much distress to 
complain of the injustice. He had ' only attempt- 
ed to worship his gods according to the dictates 
of his conscience.' * Did you pay your bills ? ' 
asked his friend. * Certainly.' ' Then what is the 
reason ? ' * His landlady had taken offense at 
his sacrificing a bull to Jupiter in his back par- 
lor.' 

" The story sounded very Yivian-Grey-ish, and 
everybody laughed at it as a very good invention ; 
but Disraeli quoted his father as his authority, 



40 BEACONSFIELD. 

and it may appear in the ' Curiosities of Litera- 
ture,' where, however, it will never be so well 
told as by the extraordinary creature from whom 
we had heard it." 

Crabb Robinson used to see Disraeli at Lady 
Blessington's in those flourishing days of his so- 
ciety heroism. His first meeting with him is thus 
described in his autobiography : 

" At Lady Blessington's, after tea. With her 
were D'Orsay, Dr. Lardner, Trelawney, Edward 
Bulwer. A stranger, whose conversation interest- 
ed and pleased me, I found to be young Disraeli. 
He talked with spirit of German literature. He 
spoke of Landor's ' Satire ' as having no satire in 
it. The chat was an amusing one." 

From these pleasant glimpses of Disraeli as he 
appeared among fashionable people and at literary 
dinners, we perceive his brilliant talent for conver- 
sation ; his wit, and admirably dramatic way of 
telling a story ; his quick criticism of the books of 
the day ; his knowledge of, and insight into, the 
conspicuous figures before the public ; his enthu- 
siasm, joyousness, and vivacity. By such quali- 
ties, he established himself in the circles to which 
he had aspired, and to which " Vivian Grey " had 
given him an entrance. 



BEACO^SFIELD. 41 



VI. 

This pet of polite society, dazzling in dress 
and speech, full of talk and wit and self-confi- 
dence, seemingly plunged in all the dissipations 
and distractions of the hour, had, however, an- 
other side to his habits and character. 

He was a fashionable fop of the di-awing-room ; 
he was also an intense and enthusiastic worker in 
his study at home. The success of " Yivian Grey " 
had fired all his ambition ; he was eager to win 
new laurels, to pass on to new literary victories. 
His faith in his own powers was limitless ; he had 
leaped at a bound to the side of Bulwer and Scott 
as a claimant for popular favor ; he would rival 
Swift as a satirist. All the while, he kept his 
political aspirations in full view. He had his eye 
already on St. Stephen's, and imagined himself 
thrilling " the House " with his bold antitheses and 
glowing periods. 

It was whispered in the clubs, " Young Disraeli 
actually wants to get into Parliament ; " and the 
young politicians laughed scornfully, while the 
old stared and rolled up their eyes in amazement 
at such iTuparalleled audacity. 

As suddenly as " Vivian Grey " had burst upon 
the town, " The Voyage of Caj)tain Popanilla " 
made its appearance, and set the gossiping tongues 
of the West End once more wagging. It was in- 



4:2 BEACONSFIELD. 

tended to be a modern " Gulliver," and to thin- 
ly disguise a bold and brilliant, yet good-natured, 
satire on the political and social follies of the day. 

The scene of this satire was laid in " the isle 
of Fantasie," which meant Ireland, and that of 
" Yraibleusia " (" True-Blue " island), which stood 
for England, the capital of the latter being " Hub- 
babub," or London. 

While thus reveling in his social popularity 
and literary conceits, Disraeli felt one longing 
which he could not repress. From earliest youth 
he had listened with eagerness to his father's 
praises of their ancient Jewish race. He had 
heard with pride its many noble traditions ; had 
been thrilled with its career of glory and power ; 
had read with the most absorbing interest the his- 
tory of its greatness, its empire, and its misfor- 
tunes. 

To be a Jew seemed to him to be the truest 
and purest aristocrat extant. The contempt and 
scorn which the English felt for the Jews only 
made him the prouder of his blood. 

And now that, in his own person, he had con- 
quered the aversion of good society, at least so 
far as himself was concerned ; now that he had 
found a vocation and succeeded in it ; now that, 
what with the royalties pouring in from "Vi- 
vian Grey " and " Popanilla," and the indulgence 
of a kind old father, who, tickled out of his 
equanimity by the youth's success, opened his 



BEACONSFIELD. 43 

purse freely to liim, he found himself in ample 
funds, he resolved at last to feed his eyes and 
his imagination upon those wondrous lands of the 
Orient which were the scenes of the Jewish strug- 
gles, deeds, and grandeur. 

He started forth on a long journey, in com- 
pany with his sister, and a Mr. Meredith, to whom 
his sister was betrothed. He went to Constanti- 
nople, and in the city of the emperors and the 
sultans spent a long, dreamy, delightful winter. 
Little, perhaps, did he then imagine that, years 
after, he would be the arbiter of the destinies of 
that fair, strange city, " at once beautiful and 
hideous," that " human bazaar of all nations, cos- 
tumes, customs, physiognomies," the metropolis 
of three continents, the citadel that guards the 
watery portal where Europe meets Asia. 

Thence he traveled with delight over many 
of the picturesque and romantic places of the 
East. He went to Albania, and there observed 
the singular and primitive customs of one of the 
most heroic people under Ottoman rule ; then 
hastened eagerly to Syria, the land of his fathers, 
and the cradle of his race, where his glowing 
imagination found ample food, and where he 
stored his mind with facts and thoughts that 
imprinted their traces on all his subsequent liter- 
ary works ; explored Egypt and the Upper Nile ; 
went thence to Jerusalem, where "he nearly lost 
his life in an attempt to penetrate the Mosque of 



44 BEACONSFIELD. 

Omar ; " sailed along tlie lovely coast of tlie 
Adriatic ; delved into the grand antiquities of 
Rome ; dreamed and wandered among the gor- 
geous ruins of the Alhambra ; and on the historic 
plain of Troy conceived his "Revolutionary 
Epic," in which he sought to celebrate the great 
revolutionists of modern times, from Robespierre 
to John Frost. After nearly two years of wan- 
dering, he returned home, full to overflowing 
with new ideas and enthusiastic fancies, with 
which to concoct for the world fresh literary sur- 
prises. His first publication after his return was 
" The Young Duke," written very hastily, and the 
poorest of his novels, though it has some power- 
ful passages. 

Full to the brim of the dreams inspired by 
his travels in the Orient, he soon finished a tale 
which he had begun " under the deep shadow of 
Eastern tradition and romance " — " The Won- 
drous Tale of Alroy." 

This romance, as one of his biographers says, 
" the critics universally hailed as a damning proof 
of the young author's literary lunacy. The book 
was beautifully written ; yet it was an exhibition 
of romance run mad, which no elegances of style 
could redeem. Wild, incongruous, and raving, it 
was laughed at unmercifully ; and for a writer to 
be laughed at in England, when he means to be 
serious — every one knows what the fate of that 
writer is. But Disraeli had pluck in him, and he 



BEACONSFIELD. 45 

recovered himself in time, but not before he had 
perpetrated several other literary absurdities of 
an extraordinary kind." 

" Alroy " is thus somewhat differently judged 
and graphically described by an American writer 
in Appletons^ Journal for May, 1870 : 

" It is an Oriental romance of the twelfth cen- 
tury, founded on the extraordinary adventures of 
David Alroy, a Hebrew prince of the house of 
David, who claimed to be Messiah, and excited 
an insurrection of the Jews against the Seljukian 
rulers of the decaying caliphate. Its historical 
foundation is probably very slight ; but, as a 
clramatic picture of Eastern manners, character, 
and scenery, of Hebrew belief, Hebrew super- 
stitions, and Hebrew aspirations, it has very high 
value. 

" The passionate and picturesque elements of 
Oriental life, the strange vicissitudes, the rapid 
revolutions, the barbaric magnificence, the pro- 
digious pomp, the incredible successes, the over- 
whelming disasters of Oriental history, are de- 
picted in the most glowing and graceful style, 
with singular boldness and warmth, and yet with 
consummate tact and delicacy. Warriors and 
priests, merchants and robbers, kings and cour- 
tiers, fanatics and intriguers, fair princesses and 
inspired prophetesses, are brought upon the scene 
in the most vivid and animated manner. 

*'The scenery of the desert, of the mighty 



46 BEACONSFIELD. 

mountain-range of Elburz, of tlie fair and fertile 
plains of the Tigris, the life of the harem, of the 
court of the caliph, of the camp of the bandit and 
of the soldier, are described with a versatile power 
not surpassed in literature, and sufficient of itself 
to entitle the author to very high rank as a poet. 
The supernatural element, so consonant with the 
traditions of the Hebrews and the genius of the 
East, is introduced freely, and always with artis- 
tic skill and striking effect. 

" Among the many powerfully drawn charac- 
ters of the romance, we have space only to allude 
to the subtle and accomplished Honain, one of 
the most original and refined creations in the 
whole range of English fiction. 

" In the profundity of its conception, and the 
rare and delicate genius of its execution, ^ Alroy ' 
rises above the common herd of novels, and takes 
rank with the few great poems of the world. It 
has to be studied, to be justly appreciated in its 
full scope and purpose, and will, we are confident, 
when better known, attain eventually an endur- 
ing fame." 

" The Wondrous Tale of Alroy " was not the 
only book he had begun while on his travels. He 
published, about the same time with this, " Con- 
tarini Fleming, a Psychological Autobiography," 
which, he says in his preface, "was written with 
great care, after deep meditation, in a beautiful 
and distant land, favorable* to composition. The 



BEACONSFIELD. 47 

author," lie goes on, "proposed to himself, in 
writing this work, a subject that has ever been 
held one of the most difficult and refined, and 
which is virgin in the imaginative literature of 
every country, namely, the development and for- 
mation of the literary character." 

" Contarini Fleming " was welcomed at once 
with salvos of applause and a din of critical de- 
nunciation. Disraeli's purpose was achieved — to 
sustain and spread his fame, and keep himself 
before the public, the talk of the drawing-rooms 
and the clubs. But in the book, says Smiles, 
" there was the same flashiness and force [as in 
* Vivian Grey '], the same dashing satire and ex- 
aggerated character, the same self -portraiture, the 
same desire to astonish people, and take them, as 
it were, by storm. And yet, withal, the book was 
full of brilliant writing and captivating imagery ; 
and, though the taste that dictated it was often 
false, the thoughts are generally striking, and the 
language chaste, elegant, and classical." 

Of this novel the writer in Apijletons^ has well 
said I " ^ Contarini Fleming ' is assuredly one of 
the most perfect of English novels. It is a great 
prose poem, in conception, in tone, in characters, 
in incidents, in style. Contarini himself, in all his 
moods and mental struggles, is admirably de- 
picted. The conflict between his Venetian nature 
and his Swedish position, ' the combination that 
connected in one being Scandinavia and the South, 



48 BEACONSFIELD. 

and made tlie image of a distant and most roman- 
tic city continually act upon a nervous tempera- 
ment, surrounded by the snows and forests of the 
North,' is finely conceived, and very happily car- 
ried out. Its successful execution was doubtless 
in great part due to the fact that the author wrote, 
riot entirely from imagination, but from the vivid 
consciousness of his own refined and subtile Ori- 
ental and Italian nature, immersed in the chill 
atmosphere of prosaic England. 

" The style of the book is worthy of the theme. 
It is animated and graceful, rich and melodious, 
though it may be a little too ornate for critical 
taste. The conversations are vivacious and easy, 
and the descriptions of scenery and of countries 
and cities, in which it abounds, singularly fine and 
effective, though brief. Its descriptions of Venice, 
of Florence, of Pisa, of Spain, Constantinople, Asia 
Minor, and Egypt, have never been surpassed in 
equal compass." 

" I published ' Contarini Fleming ' anonymous- 
ly," says Disraeli, " and in the midst of a revolu- 
tion. Gradually it found sympathizing readers ; 
Goethe and Beckf ord were impelled to communi- 
cate their unsolicited opinions of it to its anony- 
mous author, and I have since seen a criticism of 
it by Heine, of which any writer might be justly 
proud." 

Aspiring to the laurels of a poet, Disraeli now 
plied his pen zealously in the production of a 



BEACONSFIELD. 49 

" Revolutionary Epic ; " and, to challenge tlie 
verdict of the public, issued in 1834 the first 
part of it before completing the rest. It was 
for the poet, he said, to embody in his verse 
the spirit of his time. The heroic period had its 
" Iliad ; " conquering Rome its political epic, the 
" ^neid ; " the Italian Renaissance, " The Divine 
Comedy;" the Reformation, "Paradise Lost." 
The spirit of Jiis time was revolutionary. He 
says in his preface : " Is the revolution of France 
a less important event than the siege of Troy? 
Is I^J'apoleon a less interesting character than 
Achilles ? " " For me," he declares, with character- 
istic audacity, " remains the revolutionary epic." 

ISTever, indeed, did young author more frankly 
and publicly plume himself upon his all-powerful 
genius than "Disraeli the younger," when he 
serenely posed as the Homer, the Yirgil, the 
Dante, the Milton, of his time and age ! " What- 
ever may be the public's decision," he placidly 
says in his preface, "I shall bow to it without a 
murmur. For I am not one who finds consolation 
for the neglect of my contemporaries in the im- 
aginary plaudits of a more sympathetic posterity. 
The public, then, will decide whether this work is 
to be continued and completed ; and, if it pass in 
the negative, I shall without a pang hurl my lyre 
to limbo." 

The verdict of the public was indifference. 
Very few saw the book, of which only fifty copies 
4 



50 BEACONSFIELD. 

were printed for the first edition. Disraeli smil- 
ingly bowed Ms submission, and quietly aban- 
doned his Homeric aspiration. 

Several years elapsed before he gave his next 
romance to the world. He had begun to take an 
active part in politics ; he was much distracted by 
social engagements ; and he had begun to so far 
cool in his youthful ardor as to perceive that it 
would need time and reflection, as well as enthu- 
siasm, to acquire an enduring literary fame. 

" Henrietta Temple," which followed those of 
which we have spoken at an interval of three 
years, is, as says the writer in Appletons\ " a love- 
story, pure and simple, and a very charming one. 
Its heroine, who gives name to the novel, is one 
of those exquisitely gracious and refined women 
whom Disraeli loves to depict, and who are no- 
where found in greater perfection than in his 
pages. It contains also one of his most agreeable 
creations in the character of Count Mirabel, whose 
unflagging vivacity, good-nature, and gay good 
sense, are very amusing. The love-letters of the 
book are singularly successful specimens of a dif- 
ficult kind of composition, and throughout the 
work the fervor of youthful passion is happily ex- 
pressed without anything like mawkishness or sen- 
timentality." 

The same writer, in speaking of Disraeli's 
novels as a whole, gives the following estimate of 
his style, genius, and method .* 



n 



BEACONSFIELD. 51 

" As a novelist, Mr. Disraeli, though his works 
have circulated widely both in England and in 
this country, has not, we think, received that con- 
sideration to which he is justly entitled. He is 
one of the first of English authors in imagination, 
in art, in wit, in high invention, in subtile and 
refined delineation of character, and in clearness 
and grace of style. He is never obscure, and very 
seldom tiresome. There is hardly a dull page in 
all the thousands he has written. 

"He is ever bright, sparkling, vivacious, and 
intelligible. And yet his characters and scenes 
are almost always in the highest walks of society, 
and his themes often rise to the loftiest heights of 
thought and the freshest and most daring specu- 
lations of modern research. Without the slight- 
est trace of pedantry, he exhibits everywhere the 
training and the knowledge of the scholar, com- 
bined, in rare conjunction, with the wisdom and 
polish of the experienced man of the world. 

" The two leading purposes of his novels, apart 
from certain political aims in some of them, are 
the vindication of the Hebrew race and the de- 
lineation of the English aristocracy. He has de- 
scribed the land of his ancestors, and defended the 
character and celebrated the genius of the chosen 
people, in many earnest and eloquent passages, in 
several of his works. But the general range of his 
characters and scenes is in the highest walks of 
English life. IsTo other writer has depicted, with so 



52 BEACONSFIELD, 

mucli art or so much accuracy, the habits, the man- 
ners, the conversation, the modes of thought and of 
feeling, the occupations and pursuits, the follies 
and the vices, of the 'upper ten thousand' of 
England. He has been all his life associated 
with them, and has had unrivaled facilities for 
their observation and study. He has watched 
them curiously, and painted them minutely, with- 
out caricature, though perhaps not without a lit- 
tle too much rose-color on his canvas. 

"He has described their spacious domains, 
their picturesque parks, their stately mansions, 
their sumptuous life, their accomplished men and 
lovely women, as no other writer has described 
them, with inimitable grace and vivacity, and 
with a fullness and freedom which leave little to 
be desired. 

" To all coming ages his novels will have an 
ever-increasing value for their brilliant and faith- 
ful representation of the highest phase in the 
social and political life of the foremost nation of 
the nineteenth century — a delineation all the more 
valuable because the mode of life which they de- 
pict, and the social organization to which they 
refer, are inevitably transient, and likely to pass 
away, at no distant period, under the influence of 
democratic ideas. 

"It is fortunate for literature and for pos- 
terity that so perfect a picture of aristocratic 
England has been drawn by so skillful an artist in 



BEACONSFIELD. 53 

such charming and enduring colors. What would 
we not give for an equally vivid contemporaneous 
delineation of the ruling class of Assyria or Egypt, 
of Athens or Rome, of feudal France or mediaeval 
Italy?" 



VII. 

The picture presented of Disraeli in the pre- 
ceding pages would scarcely seem to be the like- 
ness of a practical and successful politician ; far 
less that of a great party leader, and a statesman 
apt in dealing with perplexing questions of in- 
ternal economy or foreign policy. A "joyous 
dandy," the frequenter of routs and balls, the 
satirist of the dinner-table, the author of extrava- 
gant society novels, full of genius, but also full of 
eccentricity and strange theories, recklessly ut- 
tered ; a Jew by descent, moreover, certain, at his 
first attempt to enter the political arena, to meet 
with the stern, set prejudices of the English against 
Jews — there would seem to be no man less fitted 
or less likely to become a political figure. 

But Disraeli, even from youth, was an ardent 
politician. He loved the fierce light that beats 
upon public characters. He yearned for the pow- 
er which a successful party chief in England 
wields. He longed to share the triumphs of the 
forensic arena ; to hold a House of Commons 



54 BEACONSFIELD. 

spell-bound by his burst of rhetoric, and to hear 
the buzz of admiration which should circle round 
the crowded benches when he should fire a shaft 
of satire, or utter a masterpiece of invective ; 
to have the papers sing choruses of applause at 
his speeches ; to compel the conciliatory smiles 
of ministers ; to revel in that combat of intellect 
against intellect, of wit against wit, of repartee 
against repartee, for which the House of Com- 
mons provided the most favorable and conspicu- 
ous of all arenas. 

From his first entrance into society, therefore, 
he had kept his ambition and purpose steadily in 
view. By hook or by crook he would enter 
Parliament. At all hazards, he would try his 
fortunes in politics. Thus early, as we have 
seen in his celebrated reply to Lord Melbourne, 
he dared to raise his eye to the very summit of 
political power, and to imagine himself shaping 
the destinies of the empire " upon which the sun 
never sets." 

But what were his political opinions at this 
period ? As far as can be made out from his 
novels, they were a strange jumble of political 
ideas, largely colored by his Oriental dreams, 
partly high Tory, and partly Radical, if not revo- 
lutionary. 

At one time he is eager to believe that the 
press and public opinion are more powerful than 
Parliament. 



BEACONSFIELD. 55 

" Opinion," he declares, " is now supreme, and 
speaks in print. The representation of the press 
is far more complete than the representation of 
Parliament. Parliamentary representation was 
the happy device of a ruder age, to which it was 
admirably adapted ; an age of semi-civilization, 
when there was a leading class in the community ; 
but it exhibits many symptoms of desuetude. If 
we are forced to revolutions, let us propose to our 
consideration a free monarchy, established on fun- 
damental laws, itself the apex of a vast pile of 
municipal and local government, ruling an educa- 
ted people, represented by a free and intellectual 
press." 

In " Coningsby," the most political of his tales, 
he treats the nobility with scorn ; and forever pre- 
serves the odious picture of the tuft-hunting toady 
and time-server, in his Taper and Tadpole. He 
vigorously assails the rotten boroughs, and yet 
seems to be seeking to make a kind of " Young 
England Toryism popular." 

" His sentiments," says Smiles, " are Tory, his 
presentiments are Radical. He feels like a Pala- 
din, he thinks like a Kepublican. In ' Coningsby,' 
while he avers that * the Whigs are worn out,' and 
that * Radicalism is polluting,' he also emphatical- 
ly declares that ' Conservatism is a sham.' Indeed, 
Mr. Disraeli is a thorough skeptic as regards all 
that Ave denominate social progress. He scouts it 
as a delusion, and represents it as a hoax." 



66 BEACONSFIELD. 

Thus, attaching himself to no party, flaunting 
his Judaic pride in sneering British faces, temer- 
ariously uttering startling theories and magnifi- 
cently rash ideas, he entered the race-course of 
politics weighted with still another heavy burden. 

He had, however, in his social career, formed 
some valuable friendships. He had become inti- 
mate with Bulwer, a brilliant young novelist like 
himself, and like himself a waverer between Tory- 
ism and Radicalism, but, unlike himself, a son of 
a great county family, with a sound patrician de- 
scent, a most thorough education, and ample 
wealth. He had attracted the attention of the 
" bilious Lord Durham," one of the foremost of 
the reform statesmen. He had won the favor of 
the great Radical Hume, and of O'Connell, then 
at the height of his power, as holding the bal- 
ance between the two great parties in the House. 
He had the advantage, moreover, of the social 
sway of the seductive Lady Blessington and the 
magnificent Count d'Orsay, who had the ear of 
powerful politicians, and were more than ready to 
use their influence for their brilliant and ambitious 
favorite. 

With a strong will and a high ambition, he 
devoted himself, after the publication of " Conta- 
rini Fleming," more ardently than ever to the 
study of the politics of the time. He read politi- 
cal history in his study ; he talked politics every- 
where in fashionable circles. Conscious that elo- 



BEACONSFIELD. 57 

cution was an essential to success, and observing 
with complacent satisfaction that few politicians 
of the day were accomplished orators, he studied 
this art with zeal, and, as it afterward proved, with 
success. 

At last an opportunity appeared to present it- 
self, and a way to open before him to the House 
of Commons. Bulwer, who was devoted to him, 
and whom Disraeli, nearly forty years afterward, 
was delighted to honor by causing him to be cre- 
ated a peer of England, advised him to come for- 
ward as a candidate in the little borough of High 
Wycombe, the seat for which had become vacant. 

Disraeli jumped at the chance. It was noth- 
ing to him that his opponent was Colonel Grey, a 
brother of Earl Grey, then Premier of England ; 
he entered the jousts as cheerily against this emi- 
nent patrician as he had always braved the laugh- 
ter and ridicule of the world. Colonel Grey was 
sustained by the Whigs, and had the whole influ- 
ence of the cabinet at his back. Disraeli had only 
a certificate of character from Edward Bulwer, 
Joseph Hume, and Lady Blessington. He was a 
party unto himself, and had only his own brains 
and pluck as his capital. 

The manner in which he proposed himseK to 
the electors was Disraelian, and nothing else. He 
freely denounced both the great parties in the 
state. He sneered loftily at the Whigs ; and as 
for the Tories, they were " in a state of ignorant 



58 BEACONSFIELD. 

stupefaction." They were haunted, he boldly 
added, "with a nervous apprehension of that 
bugbear, the people ; that bewildering title under 
which a miserable minority contrive to coerce and 
plunder a nation." 

As might be expected, the staid folk of High 
Wycombe were rather bewildered by Disraeli's 
rhetoric than persuaded by his plea ; Colonel Grey 
was elected. 

In the same year, however, Parliament was 
dissolved, and Disraeli, nothing discouraged, again 
asked High Wycombe to elect him. More boldly 
than ever he shot his arrows right and left among 
the great, tilted against every prejudice of party 
and custom, satirized hoary ministers and borough- 
laden lords, and drew fantastic sketches of pre- 
miers and chancellors. In the curious address 
which he made to the borough, he pictures Lord 
Brougham, then Lord Chancellor, " dangling about 
the great seal in post-chaises, spouting in pot- 
houses, and vowing that he would write to the 
sovereign by the post ! " 

This time he was defeated by only eleven votes. 

It is said that Earl Grey, the premier, when he 
heard the name of his brother's opponent, super- 
ciliously asked, " Who is he ? " Disraeli was stung 
by the sneer, and immediately published an in- 
dignant pamphlet under this title, " It was a fu- 
rious and very eloquent onslaught on the Whigs." 

Disraeli's next attempt to get into Parliament 



BEACONSFIELD. 59 

was in 1833, when a vacancy occurred in the me- 
tropolitan borough of Marylebone. He boldly 
told the electors that he " sought the support of 
neither of the aristocratic parties." Once, while 
making a speech in the borough, he was inter- 
rupted by some one in the audience, who cried 
out, "Upon what ground do you stand here, 
sir?" 

" On my head, sir ! " was Disraeli's sarcastic 
retort. 

Marylebone would have none of him, for all 
his eloquence ; and he was forced to resort next 
to Taunton, where Mr. Labouchere (afterward 
Lord Taunton, and son-in-law of Thomas Baring) 
was a candidate for reelection. 

The struggle at Taunton was a very bitter 
one. Labouchere was the candidate of the Whigs, 
while the Tories gave Disraeli a lukewarm, sup- 
port. O'Connel], the great Thor of Irish agita- 
tion, had just reconciled himself with the Whigs, 
and, to Disraeli's disgust, now used his influence 
with the Irish voters of Taunton in Labouchere's 
interest. Disraeli had counted on O'Connell's 
warm support ; and finding it withdi'awn from 
him, he launched out into a hot tirade against the 
Liberator. He called him an " incendiary," " a 
traitor," and exhausted his ample fund of invec- 
tive on his head. 

O'Connell was quick with his reply. Flinging 
back on Disraeli the epithets of "liar," "a living 



60 BEACONSFIELD. 

lie," he gave utterance to that bitter and scath- 
ing denunciation of his antagonist which has be- 
come memorable in the annals of political elo- 
quence. " He possesses," said the angry states- 
man, " just the qualities of the impenitent thief, 
whose name, I verily believe, must have been 
Disraeli. For aught I know, the present Disraeli 
is descended from him ; and with the impression 
that he is, I now forgive the heir-at-law of the 
blasphemous thief who died upon the cross." 

Long before this, O'Connell had fought a duel, 
and killed his opponent, and had publicly declared 
that he would never again accept a challenge. 
Lord Alvanley had sent him one, and he had re- 
fused to fight ; so his son, Morgan O'Connell, had 
taken up the quarrel. 

Disraeli was stung to the quick by O'Connell's 
insult ; and lost no time in sending a challenge, 
not to him, but to Morgan, demanding satisfac- 
tion " for the insults which your father has so 
long lavished with impunity upon his political 
opponents." Justice, however, took the matter up, 
and before the foes could meet, Disraeli was ar- 
rested and bound over to keep the peace. 

But he did not fail, even after this obstacle, 
to avenge himself. In a letter to O'Connell, sent 
to the papers, he wrote as follows : 

" Me. O'Connell : Although you have placed 
yourself out of the pale of civilization, still I am 



BEACONSFIELD. 61 

one who will not be insultedj even by a Yalioo, 
without chastising it. We shall meet at Philippic 
when I will seize the opportunity of inflicting 
castigation for the insults you have lavished upon 
me. B. DiSEAELi." 

By "Philippi," he was understood to mean 
the floor of the House of Commons ; and there, 
indeed, not many years after, he met his foe face 
to face, and held many a tournament of invective 
and vituperation with him. 

Failing to be returned at Taunton, as at Wy- 
combe and Marylebone, Disraeli was still abso- 
lutely undiscouraged, and bore himself proudly 
and confidently amid the din of political conflict. 
Once more he took up his pen, not to write spark- 
ling pictures of high life, or drape in the allegory 
of fiction his ideas of men and principles. 

"He began to recover himself," says Smiles, 
" through the means of the press, always his great 
power. He wrote a very clever, brilliant, and ad- 
mirable essay, entitled ' A Vindication of the Eng- 
lish Constitution ; ' and, shortly after, he pub- 
lished in the Times newspaper a series of very 
clever letters, afterward collected in a volume, en- 
titled ' Letters of Kunnymede.' They were racy, 
brilliant, satirical, and well informed, though oc- 
casionally rather insolent in their smartness. It 
is also supposed that, about the same time, and 
even down to a recent date, Disraeli contributed 



62 BEACONSFIELD. 

frequently to the leading columns of the * Thun- 
derer.' " 

The " Vindication " was in the shape of a " Let- 
ter to a ISToble and Learned Lord," who was Lord 
Lyndhurst, a native, it need not be forgotten, of 
Boston, Massachusetts, and lord chancellor under 
Wellington, of whom Disraeli has spoken as hav- 
ing " political courage, versatile ability, and mas- 
culine eloquence," and, not less, "tenderness of 
disposition, sweetness of temper, and ripe scholar- 
ship." 

Among the friends he had made during his 
brief and so far unsuccessful political career was 
Mr. Wyndham Lewis, a fine specimen of the old 
British landed stock, and the husband of the lady 
who, after Mr. Lewis's death, became Mrs. Dis. 
raeli. Mr. Lewis, when the general election of 
1837, for Victoria's first Parliament, apj^roached, 
invited Disraeli to stand with him as a candidate 
in the borough of Maidstone. Disraeli eagerly 
accepted the invitation, and entered into the con- 
test, side by side with his friend, as ardently and 
blithely as if he had never met a rebuff in politics. 

At the close of the poll, the young aspirant 
thrilled with delight to learn that he stood second 
in the number of suffrages cast, and to hear him- 
self formally declared, at last, a member of Par- 
liament. One great object of ambition was ful- 
filled. It remained to make the best use of the 
vast opportunities before him. His foot was on 



BEACONSFIELD. 63 

the stepping-stone to fame and power. It rested 
now with him whether he should rise or fall forever 
out of the chances of politics. 

Meanwhile it is worth noting that Queen Vic- 
toria and he who, of all living statesmen, is her 
favorite and enjoys her completest confidence, be- 
gan their public career together. 



VIII. 

DiSEAELi was in hot haste to display his elo- 
quence in " the greatest debating society in the 
world." Lady Blessington and his other friends 
encouraged him to look for a brilliant triumph. 
They were sure he would produce a great sensa- 
tion, and that he would leap at a bound to a 
national reputation as an orator. 

He had not been in the House a year before 
he prepared to make his maiden speech, by which, 
he frankly let it be known, he expected to make 
a profound impression. It became the talk of the 
clubs, and the members of the House looked for- 
ward to the dthiit of one whom they were half 
amused and half shocked to find at their side with 
almost as much impatience as did he himself. 

When the debate on the Spottiswoode combina- 
tion came up, Disraeli made this the pretext of 
his first harangue. 



64 BEACONSFIELD. 

" How the names of the parliamentary chiefs 
who took part in this discussion," says Mark 
Rochester, "recall to mind a legislative epoch 
long since faded out of the recollection of the 
generality ! Every name upon the list of the de- 
baters of that evening is famous, historical — the 
name more or less of a celebrity. More than half 
the number — the elders among this group of act- 
ors—have long since been swept away into their 
graves. The rest, then inspirited by the earlier 
and halcyon visions of a youth kindling with am- 
bition, still survive — one alone among them soured 
and disappointed, the others with many, at least, 
of their more golden hopes realized — statesmen at 
this moment both renowned and powerful." 

It was the night of December 7, 1837. Smith 
O'Brien, the rash and eloquent patriot of Erin, 
opened the debate, and was followed by "Mr. 
Bulwer, then in his thirty-second year, and in the 
first radiance of his varied reputation ; meditating 
the sequel of * Ernest Maltravers ; ' potent, though 
so young a politician, if only by reason of his 
pamphlet on ' The Crisis ; ' fresh from the comple- 
tion of the first two volumes of his history of 
* Athens and the Athenians ; ' already standing 
midway in his brilliant career as a novelist, hav- 
ing even then produced half the number of his 
far-famed works of imagination."^ 

Bulwer's speech on this occasion was one of the 
most vigorous and spirited he had yet delivered. 



BEACONSFIELD. 65 

" He is followed by Sir William Follett, the 
great advocate, destined to expire, a few years 
later on, in the very act of extending his hand to 
grasp the seals of the chancellorship. A once 
familiar figure rises directly afterward ; ' Old 
Glory ' yonder, in the blue coat, the buckskins, 
and the top-boots — pleasant-featured, bald-headed 
Sir Francis Burdett." 

Then "the Celtic Thunderer of the House," 
Daniel O'Connell, the very man whom Disraeli 
had so arrogantly promised "to meet at Philippi," 
started to his feet, and the chamber echoed with 
his sonorous brogue and his thunderbolt sentences. 

Disraeli, sitting in the second row of benches 
opposite the Speaker's chair, among the "inde- 
pendent members," bent forward to catch his for- 
midable foe's every word, and to mark his every 
glance and gesture. The benches were crowded ; 
the galleries were full of interested listeners ; it 
was just at that period of the evening when, in 
an exciting debate that inspires the bitter combat - 
of party chiefs, the House of Commons warms 
up, and is ready to listen eagerly, to cheer vocif- 
erously, and, if need be, to burst into roars of 
laughter. 

IN'o sooner had O'Connell taken his seat than 
the young and impatient member for Maidstone 
sprang up, and in a clear and loud voice cried out, 
"Mr. Speaker!" 

The floor was accorded to him, and in an in- 
5 



66 BEACONSFIELD. 

stant the House was hushed to a death-like still- 
ness. Every eye was turned toward him. In the 
ladies' gallery sat Lady Blessington and her friends, 
awaiting with palpitating hearts the moment of 
their favorite's fate. 

Scarcely had he begun to speak, however, when 
his attitude and manner, his grandiloquent sen- 
tences, his profuse gestures, brought down upon 
him the scoffs and ridicule of the assembly. 

" Disraeli's appearance and manner," says one 
who witnessed this maiden effort, " were very sin- 
gular. His dress also was peculiar ; it had much 
of a theatrical aspect. His black hair was long 
and flowing, and he had a most ample crop of it. 
His gesture was abundant ; he often appeared as 
if trying with what celerity he could move his 
body from one side to the other, and throw his 
hands out and draw them in again. At other 
times he flourished one hand before his face, and 
then the other. His voice^ too, is of a very un- 
usual kind. It is powerful, and had every justice 
done to it in the way of exercise ; but there is 
something peculiar in it which I am at a loss to 
characterize. His utterance was rapid, and he 
never seemed at a loss for words. IsTotwithstand- 
ing the result of his first attempt, however, I am 
convinced," adds this shrewd judge of parliamen- 
tary talent, " that he is a man who possesses many 
of the requisites of a good debater." 

Disraeli had not spoken more than a minute 



BEACONSFIELD. 67 

or two when " lie met with every possible mani- 
festation of opposition and ridicule from the min- 
isterial [Whig] benches, and was, on the other 
hand, cheered in the loudest and most earnest 
manner by his Tory friends ; and it is particularly 
deserving of mention that even Sir Robert Peel, 
who very rarely cheers any honorable gentleman, 
not even the most able and accomplished speak- 
ers of his own party, greeted Disraeli's speech 
with a prodigality of applause which must have 
been severely trying to the worthy baronet's 
lungs. 

" Sir Robert, as usual, sat on the first row of 
benches, a little to Disraeli's left ; and so exceed- 
ingly anxious was the baronet to encourage the 
debutant to proceed, that he repeatedly turned 
round his head, and looking the youthful orator 
in the face, cheered him in most stentorian tones. 
All, however, would not do." 

As Disraeli went on, he was more and more 
frequently interrupted by the ironical cheering, 
the feet-scraping, and the strange noises by which 
the House of Commons so freely manifests its 
displeasure. But he manfully struggled on to 
the end. He had composed his speech, and re- 
hearsed it, and no power could stop him from fin- 
ishing it. At last, however, losing all temper, and 
stung to desperation by the howling cat-calls and 
" shouts of laughter," he looked the Whigs indig- 
nantly in the face, and wound up his harangue in 



68 BEACONSFIELD. 

loud tones that trembled with, his anger and 
chagrin : 

" If honorable members think it is fair thus to 
interrupt me, I will submit. [Great laughter.] I 
would not act so to any one ; that is all I can say. 
[Laughter and cries of " Go on."] But I beg sim- 
ply to ask — [" Oh ! " and loud laughter.] Noth- 
ing is so easy as to laugh. [Roars of laughter.] 
I really wish to put before the House what is our 
position. When we remember all this — when we 
remember all that, in spite of the support of the 
honorable gentleman, the member for Dublin, and 
his well-disciplined phalanx of patriots, and in spite 
of all this, we remember the Amatory Eclogue 
[roars of laughter] — the old loves and new loves 
that took place between the noble lord, the 
Tityrus of the treasury bench, and the learned 
Daphne of Liskeard [loud laughter and cries of 
" Question ! "], which appeared as a fresh instance 
of the amoris redintegratio [excessive laughter] 
— when we remember at the same time that, with 
emancipated Ireland and enslaved England, on 
the one hand a triumphant nation, on the other a 
groaning people ; and, notwithstanding the noble 
lord, secure on the pedestal of power, may wield 
in one hand the keys of a St. Peter and — " Here 
the honorable member was interrupted with such 
loud and incessant bursts of laughter that it was 
impossible to know whether he really closed his 
sentence or not. The honorable member con- 



BEACONSFIELD. 69 

eluded in these words : " ISTow, Mr. Speaker, we 
see the philosophical prejudices of man. [Laugh- 
ter and cheers.] I respect cheers, even when they 
come from the lips of political opponents. [Re- 
newed laughter.] I think, sir — [" Hear, hear ! " 
and repeated cries of " Question, question ! "] I am 
not at all surprised, sir, at the reception which I 
have received. [Continued laughter.] I have be- 
gun several times many things [laughter], and I 
have succeeded at last. [Fresh cries of " Ques- 
tion ! "] Ay, sir ; and though I sit down now, the 
time will come when you will hear me ! " The 
honorable member delivered the last sentence in 
a very loud tone, and resumed his seat amid cheers 
from the opposition and much laughter from the 
ministerial benches. Of this indignant prophecy 
the world has long since seen the brilliant fulfill- 
ment. 

The failure of this first essay was absolute and 
complete. For the nonce Disraeli became a laugh- 
ing-stock. In the House, he could see contemptu- 
ous smiles passing from face to face as he entered ; 
and at the clubs he was the butt of the choicest 
wit of their frequenters.. 

His pluck, however, was far from being dam- 
pened by what seemed an overwhelming and ir- 
reparable misfortune. He meant his audacious 
prophecy to the House in real earnest ; and, not 
long after, expressed in "Tancred" his feeling 
about his discomfiture. 



70 BEACONSFIELD. 

" A failure," said he, " is nothing. It may be 
deserved, or it may be remedied. In the first in- 
stance, it brings self-knowledge ; in the second, it 
develops a new combination, which may be tri- 
umphant." 

Instead, therefore, of taking his terrible failure 
to heart, he had the philosophy to seek to extract 
from it a lesson for the future. It may even be 
that, had he not suffered it, he might never have 
become the strong, vigorous, and effective orator, 
upon whose lips the House of Commons learned 
to love to hang in after-years. 



IX. 

At the time that Disraeli entered Parliament, 
there was another, younger man, though an older 
member, who had already won an enviable fame 
for the rare force and persuasiveness of his elo- 
quence. He, too, like Disraeli, seems to have 
been inspired by an ambition to struggle forward 
to the highest rewards of political life. 

A graduate, with the most distinguished hon- 
ors, of the patrician university of Oxford, the 
acknowledged pet and champion of that institu- 
tion, he had already proved himself able to handle 
the most perplexing questions of statesmanship, 
by writing an essay on the relations of church 
and state. 



BEACONSFIELD. 71 

This was William Ewart Gladstone. These 
two young men, starting nearly together in the 
race for political honors, not far from the same 
age, but in almost every other respect as dissimi- 
lar as it was possible for two young men possess- 
ing the same ambition to be, were destined to be 
rivals, and the foremost rivals of their generation, 
from that day to this. 

The contrast between Gladstone and Disraeli 
was very marked, even then. True, neither was 
of aristocratic birth. Gladstone was the son of a 
respectable Liverpool merchant, Disraeli the son 
of a Jewish man of letters. But, while Disraeli 
had started in political life almost entirely with- 
out high influence, and had won his place in Par- 
liament by indomitable pluck, Gladstone entered 
the House as the pet and hope of the aristocratic 
Oxford party. 

Disraeli was not a university student ; Glad- 
stone had been the most brilliant scholar which 
Oxford had lately produced. The family tradi- 
tions of Disraeli were Jewish ; those of Gladstone 
strongly linked with the Church of England. 
Their political ideas at the commencement of 
their political careers were sharply opposed to 
each other ; and, strange to say, they are so, by a 
singular series of events, to-day — both having 
changed sides, and each thinking now what the 
other thought at the beginning. 

Gladstone entered Parliament under the pat- 



TZ BEACONSFIELD. 

ronage of the Duke of Newcastle, and carried 
with him there as well the High Tory and High 
Church principles as the enthusiastic hopes of 
the University of Oxford. He was regarded as 
the future chief of the Tory party, as its strong- 
est man among the rising generation. He was 
looked upon as the champion of the Established 
Church, in all its ancient privileges, powers, and 
abuses ; and he was welcomed to Parliament by 
all the great men of the old Tory coterie, which 
had warred upon the United States and l!^apoleon 
I., which had refused to abolish the test oath, 
refused to grant Catholic emancipation and re- 
form, and which had prosecuted Queen Caroline 
at the instigation of the heartless and dissolute 
George IV. ; by the Duke of Wellington, Sir 
Robert Peel, Lord Lyndhurst, Westmoreland, and 
Buckingham. 

Disraeli, on the contrary, began his political 
life as a strange political hybrid between Toryism 
and Radicalism. He had no aristocratic ties, no 
university prestige — was the pet of no church, of 
no caste ; he naturally allied himself with Radical 
men, because, a Jew and a plebeian, he had noth- 
ing to hope for from the ancient ruling class in 
England. He was loud for reform, bitter against 
the aristocracy and the Church ; almost preached 
democracy, and doubtless would have quite done 
so, had he dared. 

To-day, the position of each is strikingly dif- 



BEACONSFIELD. 73 

ferent. Disraeli has become the leader and the 
soul of the aristocratical Tory and High Church 
party — even its prime-minister, dictating to dukes, 
turning out lord chancellors with a quietly curt 
epistle, and dining familiarly with her Majesty at 
Windsor. Gladstone, on the other hand, has be- 
come the captain of the advance-guard of Liberal- 
ism ; and is so earnest to push forward, so eager 
to demolish the ideas of which, when young, he 
was the hottest champion, that he cannot keep 
the mass of Liberals apace with him. 

Gladstone's success as a parliamentary orator 
was instant and unequivocal ; as we have seen, 
Disraeli's debut was a desperate failure. 

But his motto was *' perseverantia omnia vin- 
cit." He sought to retrieve himself by patience, 
pertinacity, and study. Perhaps he had conned 
the story of Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, 
and had compared himself to that famous civic 
" self-made man," as he turned away from the 
London streets, to come back again and conquer. 
The example of Charles James Fox, too, may not 
have been without its lesson to him ; Fox, who 
had been so persistently coughed down, but who 
had ended by becoming the first parliamentary 
orator of his time. 

The " transformation scene " by which Dis- 
raeli gained not only a hearing, but authority in 
the House of Commons, was as sudden and sur- 
prising as the pitiful farce of his discomfiture had 



74 BEAOONSFIELD. 

been. All his friends had expected to see him 
succeed on the first occasion of his appearance in 
debate ; they looked forward with fear and fore- 
boding to the second. Like a wise man, he held 
his peace for a year and a half ; and when, one 
afternoon in 1839, he again demanded the Speak- 
er's recognition, it was to make a strong, sensible, 
straightforward speech, on the Chartist petition, 
which created a complete revulsion of feeling in 
his favor. 

" He had already," says Smiles, " thrown away 
his poetic and historical imagery, and took his 
stand on facts, feelings, and strong common-sense. 
He had carefully unlearned his faults, studied the 
character of his audience, cultivated the arts of 
speech, and filled his mind with the elements of 
parliamentary knowledge." He had learned to 
feel " that success in oratory was not to be ob- 
tained at a bound, but had to be patiently worked 
for." 

Now that the time had indeed come when 
the House would hear him, he was no longer the 
mere adventurer he had up to this period seemed 
to the public eye. Men could not, indeed, so soon 
forget his Jewish origin, for it everywhere con- 
fronted them in his features, and now and then 
in his ideas. 

But he was now recognized as a good speaker. 
He had become a valuable ally, a formidable an- 
tagonist ; the old Tory caste, while it might sneer 



BEACONSFIELD. 75 

at him in whispers and behind his back, began to 
treat him with complacent patronage, to defer 
somewhat to him, and even to pat him on the 
back and encourage him. He won the friendship 
and confidence of a great noble and politician — 
Lord Stanley, afterward Earl of Derby — side by 
side with whom he was destined to fight furious 
political battles for many years, and whom he 
was finally to succeed as the powerful and trusted 
chief of the Tory party. With this party he now 
cast in his political fortunes. He declared him- 
self a vigorous supporter of Sir Robert Peel, 
when he became premier in 1841, and for several 
years sustained him with all the energy and en- 
thusiasm of his ardent nature. 



A MOMENT came, however, when the follower 
dared to pit himself against his chief, and the au- 
dacious aspirant became the most inveterate foe 
of the once all-powerful Nestor of Torydom. 

The annals of Parliament contain no more 
memorable or exciting episode than the fierce war 
of invective, irony, and denunciation which Dis- 
raeli waged against Sir Robert Peel. The nation 
looked breathlessly on at this furious combat ; 
nor have the friends of the elder statesman yet 



76 BEACONSFIELD. 

forgotten or forgiven the stinging tirades which 
Disraeli then poured out upon their idolized leader. 

The occasion of this quarrel was Sir Robert 
Peel's conversion to the policy of the abolition of 
the corn laws ; of its cause there has been some 
difference of opinion. Disraeli's opponents have 
freely declared that it was due to Sir Robert's 
neglect to invite Disraeli to become a member of 
his ministry, and that this disappointment goaded 
Disraeli into his attitude of inveterate hostility. 
Others declare that Disraeli, foreseeing the dis- 
ruption of the Tories, shrewdly took time by the 
forelock, by placing himself at the head of those 
Tories who were about to break away from their 
old chief. Whatever the cause, it is certain that 
the alteration in Disraeli's tone was sharp and 
sudden. 

" Placed," said he, speaking of Sir Robert in 
a speech in 1841, " in an age of rapid civilization 
and rapid transition, he has adapted the practical 
character of his measures to the condition of the 
times. When in power, he has never proposed a 
change which he did not carry, and when in op- 
position he never forgot that he was the head of 
the great Conservative party. He never employed 
his influence for factious purposes, and has never 
been stimulated in his exertions by a disordered 
desire of obtaining of&ce ; above all, he has never 
carried himself to the opposite benches by mak- 
ing propositions by which he was not ready to 



BEACONSFIELD. 77 

abide. Whether in or out of office, the right hon- 
orable baronet has done his best to make the set- 
tlement of the new Constitution of England work 
for the benefit of the present time and of poster- 
ity." 

The change of tone, in three years, from this 
lavish panegyric to the most bitter taunts and 
most stinging sarcasm, was extreme. In one of 
the longest speeches Disraeli ever made in the 
House of Commons, he spoke thus contemptuous- 
ly of his old leader : 

" Sir, the right hon. gentleman has been ac- 
cused of foregone treachery, of long-meditated 
deception ... of always having intended to 
abandon the opinions by professing which he rose 
to power. Sir, I entirely acquit the right hon. 
gentleman of any such intention. I do it for this 
reason — that when I examine the career of this 
minister, who has filled a great space in the par- 
liamentary history of this country, I find that for 
between thirty and forty years, from the days of 
Mr. Horner to the days of the hon. member for 
Stockport [Mr. Cobden], that right hon. gentle- 
man has traded on the ideas and intelligence of 
others. His life has been one great appropriation 
clause. He is a burglar of others' intellect. . . . 
There is no statesman who has committed political 
petty larceny on so great a scale." 

"The daring onslaught thus made by Dis- 
raeli," says Mark Rochester, " upon the authori- 



78 BEACONSFIELD. 

tative leader of the House, tlie chief of a strong, 
apparently impregnable government, then the 
most practised of living debaters, one whose per- 
fect mastery of all the arts of discussion was such 
that his assailant has since written of him em- 
phatically that ^he played upon the House of 
Commons like an old fiddle ' — ^that defiant, single- 
handed, unflinching onslaught, thus adventured 
upon by Disraeli, must ever remain on record as 
one of the most surprising incidents in the annals 
of the British Parliament. 

"The missiles hurled by the assailant, with an 
aim that seldom if ever missed, were each as 
slight, apparently, but as potent, as a pebble of 
the Terebinthine valley. A deadly irony, a 
barbed sarcasm, a withering ridicule ; here the 
stab of a sneer, here the thrust of a taunt, here 
the blow of an imputation. 

"In a single sentence, sometimes, Disraeli 
struck to the right and to the left, at the domineer- 
ing leader of the House of Commons, Sir Robert 
Peel, and at the despotic leader of the Lords, the 
Duke of Wellington." 

" Another place," he exclaimed bitterly, in the 
parliamentary phrase signifying the House of 
Peers, "another place may be drilled into a 
guard-room, and the House of Commons may be 
degraded into a vestry ! " 

The principal, almost the exclusive object 
upon which, with a view to its demolition, he 



BEACONSFIELD. 79 

plied all tlie keen and polislied weapons of his 
satirical armory, was the overshadowing reputa- 
tion of the one dominant statesman on the treas- 
ury bench in the popular assembly ; one until 
then unassailed, and by many deemed unassail- 
able. Several of the gibes then directed against 
Sir Robert are as famous, as ridiculous, as laugh- 
ter-moving, as a caricature by Gillray or by Row- 
landson. "The right honorable baronet," said 
Disraeli, " has caught the Whigs bathing, and has 
run away with their clothes." 

The great minister's solemn array of argu- 
ments he coolly degraded into so many fallacies 
based upon " tea-kettle precedents." Peel himself 
was flagrantly dubbed "a great parliamentary 
middleman." It was impossible even for his de- 
voted partisans and personal adherents to listen 
and preserve a grave countenance. 

Once, Sir Robert was earnestly recommended, 
by the implacable wit, " to stick to quotation ; 
because," said his relentless foe, "he [the premier] 
never quoted any passage that had not previously 
received the meed of parliamentary approbation." 

On another occasion, the House was begged 
" to dethrone a dynasty of deception, by putting 
an end to this intolerable yoke of official despotism 
and parliamentary imposture." 

The speeches of Sir Robert Peel, as reported 
in Hansard, were summarily characterized as 
" dreary pages of interminable talk, full of pre- 



80 BEACONSFIELD. 

dictions falsified, pledges broken, calculations 
that have gone wrong, and budgets that have 
blown up ; and all this not relieved by a single 
original thought, a single generous impulse, a 
single happy expression." The political tactics 
of his government were summed up, with a subtle 
and exquisite wit, as " a system so matter-of-fact, 
yet so fallacious — taking in everybody, though 
everybody knew he was deceived ; a system so 
mechanical, yet so Machiavellian, that he could 
hardly say what it was, except a sort of humdrum 
hocus-pocus, in which the order of the day was 
moved, to take in a nation ! " 

This famous tirade was concluded by appealing 
to the House to prove that " cunning is not cau- 
tion, nor habitual perfidy high policy of state." 

Once more, Disraeli described his victim — for 
surely victim a statesman must be called who 
suffered from shafts so piercing — as " a man who 
bamboozled one party and plundered the other, 
till, having obtained a position to which he was 
not entitled, he called out, ' Let us have no party 1 
let us have fixity of tenure ! ' " 

Alluding, on another occasion, to a previous 
decision of the House that had been canceled, 
" I really think," said Disraeli, " to rescind one 
vote during the session is enough. I don't think 
in reason we ought to be called upon to endure 
this degradation more than once a year. The 
right honorable baronet [Peel] has joined in the 



BEACONSFIELD. 81 

antislaveiy cry ; but it seems that his horror of 
slavery extends to every place except the benches 
behind him. There, the gang is still assembled, 
and there the thong of the whip still sounds. If 
the whip were less heard there, the right honor- 
able baronet's conduct would be more consistent 
with his professions." 

" No marvel that the great minister worried 
under this deadly ridicule, and at last succumbed. 
No wonder the House learned at length to recog- 
nize in the ex-member for Maidstone the most 
brilliant satirist and one of the most gifted and 
daring debaters within the walls of the legislature. 
For the acerbity of these attacks, in which every 
sentence had the point of an epigram, Disraeli 
has magnanimously compensated since the death 
of his great antagonist, by a generous tribute to 
his genius, expressed in the language of admira- 
tion. 

" If there be one peculiarity more conspicuous 
than another in the temperament of Disraeli, it is 
that of his possessing a generous capacity for the 
magnanimous appreciation of his parliamentary 
antagonists. Witness this, not merely his pane- 
gyric on Sir Robert Peel, but his noble eulogium 
on Lord Palmerston in one of the chapters of 
'Tancred,' and his graceful but earnest enco- 
mium on Mr. Hume in the earlier pages of a later 
composition." 

This same generous trait appears in the fine 
6 



82 BEACONSFIELD. 

tribute wliicli Disraeli, some years after, paid to 
one of his most inveterate opponents, Lord Jolm 
Russell, when lie withdrew the Aberdeen Reform 
Bill. On this occasion the Tory leader said : 

" Although it has been my fate to be always 
seated opposite to the noble lord, I can say, most 
sincerely, that no one in this House has a more 
heart-felt respect for the noble lord than I have. 
I think his character and career are precious pos- 
sessions of the House of Commons ; and I am 
sure that the members of this House will always 
cherish them. Wherever the noble lord sits, I 
am sure he will be accompanied by the respect of 
every member of this House ; and I think the 
manner in which, to-night, he has made what was 
evidently a painful communication, is in every 
way worthy of the noble lord's character." 

No more graceful praise was ever uttered by a 
statesman of a formidable and obstinate political 
rival. 



XI. 

DisEAELi had not been long in Parliament 
before an event happened which had a very im- 
portant influence on his after-career. It has al- 
ready been said that one of his warmest support- 
ers in the election at Maidstone was Mr. Wynd- 
ham Lewis, also a candidate for the borough. 



BEACONSFIELD. 83 

After tlieir success at the polls, Disraeli became 
more than ever intimate in his colleague's family- 
circle ; it was there that he had met the lady who 
was afterward to become one of the most devoted, 
helpful, and ambitious wives who ever lived. 

Mr. Lewis was already ill when he was chosen 
at Maidstone ; and he did not long survive to 
serve the borough in Parliament. Two years 
after his death, Disraeli married his widow. 

It is said that this lady's attention was first 
attracted to her future second husband by read- 
ing and admiring " Vivian Grey ; " that she so 
much admired the talent displayed in the book, 
that she took pains to seek out its author, to in- 
vite him to the hospitalities of her house, and to 
ardently befriend him in any possible way. She 
was not only an elegant leader of society, but a 
woman of superior intelligence, practical wisdom, 
profound sense, and noble character. 

Despite the fact that she was fourteen years 
older than Disraeli, being, at the time of their 
marriage, forty-eight years of age while he was 
only thirty-four, their acquaintance quickly ri- 
pened into a most congenial friendship, and this 
deepened, after she became a widow, into an abid- 
ing mutual affection which lasted during her life. 

It has always been remarked of Disraeli, in- 
deed, that one of his finest traits of character was 
his loving and chivalrous devotion to the partner 
of his life. His leisure hours were always spent 



84 BEAOONSFIELD. 

in her congenial companionship. She was his 
counselor in all his labors, political and intellect- 
ual ; went over his speeches with him, discussed 
what course he should pursue at difficult junc- 
tures, shared the joy of his triumphs, and was his 
efficient consoler in his discomfitures. He seldom 
appeared in society unless in her company ; and 
always seemed as proud of her and as tender of 
her as if, instead of being a matron much older 
than himself, she had been a fair and youthful 
bride. 

Often was he seen, when his wife had, before 
him, grown aged and feeble, slowly walking in 
the London streets, supporting her on his arm, 
carefully accommodating his pace to hers, bending 
his head with tender deference when she spoke, 
and chatting to her in his pleasant, jaunty way. 
She, on the other hand, reveled in his Ibrilliant 
feats, and it was the happiness of her life to ap- 
plaud his successes, and spur him on to the high- 
est flights at which his ambition could aim. 

It was her custom to never be absent from a 
debate in the House of Commons in which he was 
to take part. Night after night, her tall, frail 
figure and quiet, intelligent face were seen in the 
ladies' gallery, which was shut in by glass win- 
dows, and where she nearly always occupied a 
front seat. When Disraeli rose to speak, she would 
lean forward, a new light would gleam from her 
eyes, and she would listen almost breathlessly to 



BEACONSFIELD. 85 

every word he uttered, and watch every gesture 
and movement he made. 

Disraeli has always prepared his speeches with 
the greatest care. Without writing them out in 
full, he made copious notes, and his rhetorical 
flights, epigrammatic "hits," and florid perora- 
tions were invariably prepared and polished with 
minute attention. When his mind was once 
charged with a contemplated speech, he became 
absorbed in it, and was very particular not to 
have it disturbed or diverted to other matters. 
He would hasten directly from his study to the 
House, sit there wrapped in thought, with his hat 
over his eyes, speaking to or noticing no one, un- 
til the time came for him to rise and deliver him- 
self of his harangue. 

His wife knew how important it was that he 
should be undisturbed ; and, though she always 
accompanied him in his carriage from their home 
at the West End to Westminster, she would re- 
main silent during the drive, that he might cogi- 
tate his speech in peace. 

On one occasion, Disraeli entered the carriage 
first, and his wife followed him. As she was get- 
ting in, however, resting her hand on the door, 
the carriage window fell, and crushed and firmly 
held her thumbs so that she could not easily extri- 
cate it. 

The position of her thumb, jammed and lacer- 
ated as it was, was excruciatingly painful. But 



86 BEACONSFIELD. 

sTie neither tried to withdraw it, nor did she utter 
a sound. Heroically she held it there, tortured as 
she was, while the carriage rattled over the streets, 
and jolted and jarred, with each jolt adding a new 
thrill of pain. 

On reaching the Parliament House, she quiet- 
ly lifted the window, concealed the bruised thumb, 
and, as she parted from her husband at the door, 
gave him a serene, bright, encouraging smile. She 
passed on to the ladies' gallery, and he into the 
House. He made one more of his sparkling, dash- 
ing, fascinating speeches ; nor did he learn of the 
suffering thus endured by his faithful wife until, 
his triumph achieved, they returned home again. 
Disraeli never let a proper occasion pass without 
bearing public testimony to the noble virtues of 
his wife, and attributing to her advice and inspira- 
tion a large share of his political success. 

Once, at one of those autumn " harvest-homes " 
which he has always delighted to frequent, the 
cares of politics being thrown aside, at Hughen- 
den, he launched into an ardent eulogy of her, 
declaring her to be " the best wife in England." 
He told the students of one of the Scotch uni- 
versities, of which he had been elected lord rector, 
that if he had risen to high seats in the councils 
of the nation, he had Mrs. Disraeli to thank for 
it. His novel "Sibyl," of which he was espe- 
cially proud, he dedicated fondly "to the most se- 
vere of critics, but a perfect wife." 



BEACONSFIELD. 87 

Happily she lived long enougli to see the ful- 
fillment of his and her loftiest aspirations. It was 
the proudest day of her life when her idolized 
husband became at last Prime-Minister of Eng- 
land ; and aged as she was, she presided with 
singular grace, dignity, and refinement, over the 
household of the real ruler of the realm. 

When he was about to retire from the premier- 
ship, and transfer it to his life-long rival, Glad- 
stone, the queen, with whom Disraeli has always 
been a special favorite, offered him a peerage. 
While grateful for this intended honor, he de- 
clined it ; but told the queen that, if she desired 
to bear such a testimony to his public services, 
she could not more greatly favor him than to 
confer the peerage on the loving partner of his 
life. 

So, while he remained simply Mr. Disraeli, and 
continued for some years longer to sit in his ac- 
customed place in the House of Commons, his 
wife became " Viscountess Beaconsfield," and took 
her rank among the nobility of the kingdom. 

She died several years ago, and was tenderly 
laid in her last resting-place, the family tomb at 
Hughenden. 



88 BEACONSFIELD. 



XII. 



DuEiiTG the busy periods between DisraelPs 
entrance into Parliament and his promotion, after 
the fall of Sir Robert Peel, to the position of a 
leader of the out-and-out Tories, neither his fancy 
nor his pen was by any means idle. 

At intervals of two or three years, other nov- 
els were the fruit of his relaxation from political 
toil and warfare ; he could not resist those fas- 
cinations of imaginative literature, following the 
allurements of which he had won name and fame ; 
and so far was he from being ashamed of his early 
literary work, or cowed by the sneers of his op- 
ponents, that he more audaciously than ever fol- 
lowed the bent of his mind, and boldly clothed 
daring political ideas in the attractive dress of 
fiction. 

First came " Venetia," a novel given to the 
world the first year he entered the House of Com- 
mons. 

Of this novel, the writer in Appletons' says that 
it is " the most purely literaiy of Disraeli's novels. 
It is an attempt to shadow forth two of the most 
renowned and refined spirits that have adorned 
these our latter times — Byron and Shelley — who 
are represented under the names of Lord Cadur- 
cis and Marmion Herbert. To Herbert, however, 
are assigned many of the incidents of Byron's 



BEACONSFIELD. 89 

history, and to Cadurcis the melancholy termina- 
tion of Shelley's life by drowning in the Mediter- 
ranean. Herbert is represented as separated from 
his wife, and his daughter Yenetia, who gives 
name to the novel, is, like Ada Byron, brought up 
in ignorance of her father and his unhappy career. 
The time of the novel, also, is thrown back to 
the period of the American Revolution, before 
either Byron or Shelley was born. In other re- 
spects, the story of the two great and unhappy 
poets is very closely followed." 

Then, in quick succession, came the three most 
celebrated, perhaps, of all Disraeli's works of fic- 
tion, excepting his very last, " Lothair." These 
were what he was pleased to style a " trilogy " of 
political novels : " Coningsby," " Sibyl," and " Tan- 
cred." 

Disraeli had long in contemplation the forma- 
tion of a new party, which he called that of 
" Young England " — a cross between Radicalism 
and Toryism ; and to the " Young England " party 
the first of the three, " Coningsby," was devoted. 
In it he explained thus his political idea : 

" To change back the oligarchy into a gener- 
ous aristocracy round a real throne ; to infuse life 
and vigor into the Church as the trainer of the 
nation by the revival of a convocation, then dumb, 
on a wide basis, and not, as has been since done, 
in the shape of a priestly section ; to establish a 
commercial code on the principles successfully 



90 BEACONSFIELD. 

negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utreclit, and 
whicli, though baffled at the time by a Whig Par- 
liament, were subsequently and triumphantly vin- 
dicated by his political pupil and heir, Mr. Pitt ; 
to govern Ireland according to the policy of 
Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell ; to eman- 
cipate the political constituency of 1832 from its 
sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies ; to 
elevate the physical as well as the moral condition 
of the people by establishing that labor requires 
regulation as much as property, and all this rather 
by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of 
the past than by political revolutions founded 
upon abstract ideas," 

" Coningsby," and the manner in which it was 
received, are vividly described in these words : 
"In its way, * Coningsby' was as great and as 
startling a success as ' Vivian Grey.' It has been 
very heartily abused ; it has been praised almost 
as heartily. It has been condemned for relying 
for its attractiveness on the most ephemeral quali- 
ties, and it is still popular enough to yield a good 
income to its publishers. It is accused of person- 
ality ; and in spite of the fact that the greater 
number of the persons satirized are dead, the cari- 
catures survive. 

" At this distance of time no harm can be done 
by recalling a few of those whose idiosyncrasies 
are thus hit off. The hero is of course Lord Lyt- 
telton ; Rigby is said to have been intended for 



BEACONSFIELD. 91 

Mr. John Wilson Croker. Lord Monmouth, Con- 
ingsby's grandfather, is a faithful portrait — not 
in oil — of Lord Hertford ; while the Duke and 
Lord Henry Sidney stand respectively for the 
Duke of Rutland and Lord John Manners. Lu- 
cian Gay is of course Theodore Hook, and Mr. 
Gladstone significantly figures as Oswald Milbank. 
Lord and Lady Everingham stand for the Earl 
and Countess of Clarendon ; Lady St. Julians for 
Lady Jersey, and the Duke and Duchess of Agin- 
court for the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham 
and Chandos. Taper and Tadpole are said, on 
less authority, to stand for Mr. Ross and Mr. 
Pringle, whose names were once familiar to the 
political world, but who are now forgotten." 

Of this novel, another critic says : " ' Conings- 
by ' is very brilliant and powerful. It has great 
wit and more humor than the author usually dis- 
plays. The sketch of 'The Right Honorable 
Nicholas Rigby ' is a masterpiece of satire, and 
the character of ' Sidonia ' a fine conception ad- 
mu-ably carried out." 

The next novel of the trilogy was " Sibyl," 
which, as has been said, was dedicated to his wife, 
and was the author's especial pride. It was in- 
tended as a sort of sequel, or development, of 
" Coningsby," and " is a story of singular power, 
full of those touches of higher art of which, in 
some quarters, the author is believed to be inca- 
pable," It deals largely with the famous Chartist 



92 BEACONSFIELD. 

troubles of tlie times during whicli it was written. 
It has "great variety, its scenes and characters 
ranging from the highest patrician circles to the 
lowest depth of social degradation. It contains 
a startling picture of the misery of the lower or- 
ders of England, very striking in itseK, and very 
significant as proceeding from the authentic pen 
of one of her most eminent statesmen." 

Following "Sibyl" came "Tancred," by far 
the most quoted and in some respects most pow- 
erful and impressive of Disraeli's romances. " It 
was a true instinct," says the author of " Political 
Portraits," "which directed Disraeli's youthful 
footsteps, as it almost always, after more or less 
wandering, has directed his pen, to his ancestral 
East." "Tancred" was the most finished, the 
most ripened, outcome of that Oriental Journey. 

Its great idea is the supremacy of the Jewish 
race ; while as a glowing picture of Oriental 
life and character, and as a graphic contrast be- 
tween the genius of the West and that of the 
East, it is superior to, though more subdued than, 
"Alroy." 

"In * Alroy,'" says the writer in AppUtons^ 
whom we have so often quoted, " the author is only 
a poet, though a very great one. In ' Tancred ' 
he has become a statesman, without ceasing to be 
also a poet. The ' ISTew Crusade ' (the other title 
of the book) is that of a young English noble- 
man, who seeks to discover at the fountain-head 



BEACONSFIELD. 93 

the source and meaning of the great Asian mys- 
tery, and sets out accordingly for the Holy Land, 
like his chivalrous ancestors of the twelfth cen- 
tury. He there falls in with the mysterious An- 
sarey, an obscure and singular Syrian tribe, ad- 
hering to ancient paganism, of whom a most in- 
teresting and original description is given. 

" The English part of the novel, with which it 
begins, is very charming for its easy grace and 
pleasant satire of the prevalent follies of the day. 
ISTothing can be better than the Darwinian young 
lady who has read * The Revelations of Chaos,' 
which explains everything, and shows you exactly 
how a star is formed, and who believes that we 
were once fishes and shall yet be crows. Equally 
good is the fashionable lady who mingles senti- 
ment with stock- jobbing, and is prostrated in the 
presence of her romantic lover by a telegram an- 
nouncing a fall in the shares of a railroad." 

ISTearly thirty years were to elapse, after Dis- 
raeli had written " Finis " to " Tancred," before he 
again resumed his pen to indulge his genius for 
suggestive fiction. It was not until after he had 
reached and then retired from the great office 
which he was destined afterward to hold a second 
time, that, in the leisure of political opposition, he 
wrote and published " Lothair." The hand of the 
magician was still deft and cunning, the fire of his 
fancy still glowed with a warm and luminous 
flame ; he proved that lengthening age had not 



94 BEACONSFIELD. 

deprived him of the zest for literary work, or 
diminislied the power of his art. 

It has been said of " Lothair " that it is " less 
political than its immediate predecessors. Eng- 
lish politics, in fact, scarcely enter into it at all 
except in a few Fenian sketches. Its hero, Lord 
Lothair, is, like Tancred, a young English noble- 
man of the highest rank and of enormous wealth, 
one of whose guardians during his orphan minority 
was a Jesuit, who is a cardinal of the Church of 
Rome, and who strives to bring his ward over to 
Romanism. For this purpose he employs all the 
arts and wiles of the Jesuits, which are narrated 
very minutely, and with the author's highest 
skill. 

" Lothair, after a series of adventures, in which 
Colonel Campian, an American, and his Italian 
wife Theodora, are conspicuous, joins the Gari- 
baldian army which sought in 1867 to drive the 
pope from Rome, is initiated into the great secret 
revolutionary societies of * the Mary Anne,' and 
the ^Madre Natura,' and, desperately wounded 
in the battle of Mentone, falls into the hands of 
the papal forces, and is consigned to the care of 
his Jesuit friends in Rome. They renew their 
efforts to convert him, and by strange and varied 
arts very nearly succeed. 

" He escapes, however, first to Sicily ; then in 
an open boat to Malta, where, under English pro- 
tection, he baffles the pursuit of the Jesuits, and 



BEACONSFIELD. 95 

embarks for the East and visits Jerusalem. His 
experiences there are narrated in the author's best 
style, and are very peculiar and curious. 

" Its perusal shows that, in the interval since 
he published ^Tancred,' Mr. Disraeli's invention 
has not lost its force, nor his hand its cunning. 
He is destined to a high and enduring reputation 
in literature, and long after English power has 
decayed and English ministries have passed into 
oblivion, his brilliant pictures of English life and 
character will survive, and 'far climes and dis- 
tant ages will respond to the magic of his sym- 
pathetic page.' " 

" Disraeli's writings," says a writer in JLofidon, 
Society J "have always been pure and elevating 
in tone. The characters which he has selected for 
eulogy, or the models which he has held up for 
imitation, have all been of an ennobling kind. 
The atmosphere into which he introduces us is 
healthy and sweet. His husbands are honest ; 
his wives are true ; his maidens are pure ; and his 
lads are ingenuous. He has never written a word 
which a father would not read to his daughter, or 
a lover to his betrothed. And, in ' Yivian Grey ' 
and ' Lothair ' alike, there is the same chivalry of 
sentiment, the same generosity of soul, the same 
loyalty to the cause of friendship. There is noth- 
ing more interesting in Mr. Disraeli's history than 
his devotion to and his championship of those 
whose friendship he has made. In his biography 



96 BEACONSFIELD. 

of Lord George Bentinck, professedly a panegyric 
as that biography is, there is not a word which 
savors of fulsome insincerity." 



XIII. 



From the day that Sir Robert Peel, "aban- 
doning his party to serve his country," repealed 
the corn laws, Lord Stanley (later Earl of Derby), 
who had been a reformer of 1832, and Disraeli, 
the author of radical "Coningsby," became the 
acknowledged leaders of the old-fashioned Tories, 
and thenceforward were to put themselves obsti- 
nately against the tide of progress which had per- 
manently set in in England. 

From that time, too, Disraeli acquired another 
of those many and singular honors which are the 
rewards of English statesmen ; he made his ap- 
pearance in Punch / and nearly every week, for 
thirty years, his Jewish curls, and large black 
eyes, and bold thick nose, and long narrow face, 
have appeared in that most unique of political 
satires. " Dizzy," . a nickname originated by 
Punchy became his appellation everywhere among 
the facetious of society, and by that name he 
is known from Land's End to John O' Groat's 
House. 

The time had not yet come, however, when he 



BEACONSFIELD. 97 

could be the unquestioned chief of the Tory party. 
As long as the eloquent and chivalrous Earl of 
Derby lived, and took a part in politics, his place 
was the second one. Derby had birth, wealth, 
personal popularity, wide family connection, and 
great parliamentary talent ; of these Disraeli had 
only the last. His birth was, as far as his rela- 
tions with the Tories were concerned, far worse 
than useless ; his property was limited ; far from 
being personally popular, we doubt if there ever 
was an English statesman more positively and 
generally disliked ; far from being politically 
trusted, we doubt if there was ever a party leader 
who inspired less confidence. 

The nobles who followed him knew that he 
had been a Radical, and that he was intensely am- 
bitious ; might he not, then, still be a Radical at 
heart, and, some fine day, betray them all into 
the hands of their enemies ? Some sUch idea was 
once actually expressed by a noble lord who loved 
Toryism, but not its Hebrew exponent ; and when 
we remember that Disraeli, some years after, per- 
suaded the Tories to pass a reform bill, compared 
with which that proposed by the Liberals was no 
reform at all, the utterance seems to have been 
shrewdly prophetic. 

Strange to say, too, Disraeli's literary reputa- 
tion was a serious obstacle to obtaining the confi- 
dence of his political associates. The Howards 
and Nevilles, the Percys and Wellesleys, the 
7 



98 BEACONSFIELD. 

Courtenays and Churcliills, reluctantly followed 
tlie lead of a sensational novelist. 

The repugnance of the patrician Tories to him 
was so great, that though they sat with him in 
council, and deferred to his opinions, they long^ 
neglected to extend to him the hospitality of 
their houses. 

Yet with all these obstacles and prejudices — 
prejudices which must have bitterly, in secret, 
galled a high spirit like that of Disraeli — he suc- 
ceeded in establishing himself more and more 
firmly as an absolute necessity to his party. 

A hasty temper, an impudent remark, a petu- 
lant outburst of resentment, might have forever 
overthrown him. Had he committed such a blun- 
der, there were plenty in his own ranks to seize 
upon it as an opportunity to get rid of him. He 
had few ties, little extraneous propping, to save 
him. For one reason alone was he endured by 
the Tories : he was useful, he had the power and 
the genius to save them. A more imperturbable 
equanimity of temper, a more perfect self-con- 
trol, a serener patience, have never been displayed 
in a political career, than his during his leadership 
of the Tory party. If his soul has been stung by 
contempt or superciliousness, he has not only con- 
cealed the wound, but has availed himself of it in 
castigating his foes. 

The greatest master of irony of his time, he 
has, armed with this formidable gift, lashed his 



BEACONSFIELD. 99 

adversaries the more severely, by keeping a cool 
and steady head and a firm hand, that never for- 
got their power. 

Willing to stand alone, submitting to be bare- 
ly suffered, conscious that his party allies were 
seldom his personal friends, Disraeli has owed 
his success as much to his admirable pluck and 
his excellent temper as to his brilliant and aggres- 
sive talents. 

It was mainly through his leadership that the 
Tories, thrown into confusion by Peel's defection, 
were reformed into a compact and disciplined 
body, and gradually increased in popularity and 
power. 



XIV. 



The time quickly came when the reward of his 
consummate generalship, in conjunction with that 
of Derby, was reaped. In 1852, Lord John Rus- 
sell resigned the premiership, and the Earl of 
Derby, with a Tory cabinet, succeeded him. 

Everybody awaited with curiosity to see what 
part Disraeli would now be called upon to play. 
He was without question the second man in the 
triumphant party ; to him, in large measure, was 
due its triumph ; he led it in the House of Com- 
mons. Yet, was it possible that this fantastic 
figure, as he was still considered, would actually 



100 BEACONSFIELD. 

be made, as was customary, Chancellor of tlie Ex- 
chequer? People smiled to imagine "Yivian 
Grey" proposing a budget, and arranging the 
finances of England ; to think of this whilom 
Radical lording it officially in the House over 
younger sons of peers and staid but proud old 
county baronets. 

The Earl of Derby was brave enough to meet 
the storm of his own party, of his noble connec- 
tions, and of the deep-seated prejudices of Eng- 
land. Disraeli could not be spared. He would 
take no office but the Chancellorship of the Ex- 
chequer ; and Chancellor of the Exchequer, there- 
fore, he became. 

How the English public took this startling 
appointment may be somewhat judged by a witty 
letter, written at this time by Douglas Jerrold to 
his friend Mr. Novello : 

" I must congratulate you on the advent of 
the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. The 
Right Honorable Benjamin Disraeli is the suc- 
cessful man of letters. He has ink in his veins. 
The goosequill — let gold and silver sticks twinkle 
as they may — leads the House of Commons. Thus 
I feel confident that the literary instincts of the 
right honorable gentleman will give new anima- 
tion to the coldness of statesmanship, apt to be 
numbed by tightness of red tape. We were, I 
know, early taught to despair of the right honor- 



BEACONSFIELD. lOi 

able gentleman, because he is allowed to be the 
smallest of things, ' a wit.' Is arithmetic forever 
to be the monopoly of substantial respectable 
dullness? Must it be that a Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, like Portia's portrait, is only to be 
found in lead ? No ; I have a cheerful faith that 
our new fiscal minister will, to the confusion of 
obese dullness, show his potency over pounds, 
shillings, and pence. The Exchequer L. S. D., 
that have hitherto been as the three witches — the 
weird sisters — stopping, whenever we turned, the 
right honorable gentleman will at least transform 
into the three Graces, making them in all their 
salutations, at home and abroad, welcome and 
agreeable." 

Disraeli's service in the second political office 
of England was but brief, for the first Derby 
cabinet survived but seven months. But in that 
brief period he displayed qualities of statesman- 
ship and leadership that he had not before been 
supposed to possess. 

He led his party, as chief of the government 
in the House of Commons, with masterly tact and 
skill ; he managed the finances as if figures had 
always been his forte ; and when he presented the 
annual budget, he displayed a remarkable clear- 
ness and soundness that showed how careful and 
effective a study he had made of fiscal science. 

Thj'oughout the coalition ministry of the Earl 



102 BEACONSFIELD. 

of Aberdeen — through the exciting period of the 
Crimean War — through the first administration of 
Lord Palmerston, Disraeli still led, gallantly and 
pertinaciously, the Tory opposition in the lower 
House. Finally, in March, 1858, the Palmer st on 
government, defeated on the " conspiracy to mur- 
der " bill, was compelled to retire, and once more 
the Tories came in, with Lord Derby as Premier, 
and Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

This time, they made a desperate effort to hold 
on to power : Disraeli brought out a masterpiece 
of a budget ; the cabinet, although Tory, brought 
forward a reform bill, which the Liberal cabinets 
had failed to do. The country, however, was not 
yet with them ; their reform bill failed, and after 
administering the government a little more than a 
year, they retired in June, 1859, giving place in 
turn to Lord Palmerston. 

There was another long shady era for the 
Tories, from '59 to '66. But Disraeli, the lieu- 
tenant and unresting ally of Derby, the Tory chief, 
never lost heart, but worked assiduously to effect 
union in the Tory ranks, and to deliver continual 
assaults on the ministry. Lord Palmerston, al- 
though nominally a Liberal, was known to be 
hostile to reform ; and, by reason of his personal 
popularity in England, and his wonderful capacity 
for conciliating divergent views, during his life- 
time he succeeded in ignoring that great ques- 
tion. The venerable Premier died, in full posses- 



BEACONSFIELD. 103 

sion- of his mental faculties, at more than eighty, 
in the autumn of 1865 ; and his veteran lieutenantj 
himself past seventy, Earl Russell, became Prime- 
Minister. 

It was evident that the reform question could 
no longer he avoided ; so Lord Russell and Mr. 
Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought 
a reform bill into Parliament in May, 1866. 

The discussion was long and violent ; the Lib- 
erals in the House of Commons began to show a 
deplorable want of harmony, and finally, upon an 
amendment of Lord Dunkellin, the cabinet was 
defeated, in July, 1866, by five majority in a very 
full house. Russell and Gladstone, indignant that 
the blow should come from their own side, where 
less than a year before there had been a Liberal 
majority of at least sixty votes, resigned. 

The only alternative was a return of the Derby 
party, led in the Commons by the indefatigable 
and unsubduable Disraeli. Lord Derby became, 
for the third time, Prime-Minister, the adventu- 
rous Jewish novelist a third time Chancellor of the 
Exchequer. 

The new cabinet found itseK face to face 
with a very grave state of affairs. The agitation 
in the country on the question of electoral reform 
was very great, and reached a dangerous height 
in the autumn of 1866. Monster meetings were 
held in the large cities, and leagues were formed, 
with the avowed object of forcing, by popular 



104 BEACONSFIELD. 

pressure, a large concession of reform from the 
Tory ministers. The Tories had just voted 
against the Gladstone reform as too democratic ; 
they had denounced it as ruinous ; Lord Lytton 
had declared it revolutionary. Yet now public 
opinion would not accept any other than a reform 
which should far surpass that of Gladstone. 

Here were the Tories in office ; they had long 
lived in the cold shade of opposition, deprived of 
those sweets of office which they were now enjoy- 
ing ; they could only remain by either coming to 
a direct issue with the agitation, thus endanger- 
ing civil war, or, belying all their party traditions 
and latest declarations, concede a greater reform 
than that which they had opposed. 

There can be no doubt that Disraeli, and he 
alone, saved the Tory cabinet and the Tory party 
at this juncture. A bold and audacious, and, as 
the event proved, sagacious statesman, utterly in- 
different to taunt or menace, he proposed to his 
patrician followers that they should adopt a policy 
of "household suffrage." It was a hazardous 
thing to attempt to persuade the aristocratic ^arty 
to turn its back on its whole previous career, and 
adopt a measure that was nothing if not revolu- 
tionary ; yet more hazardous, perhaps, to suggest 
it to the country. Possibly Disraeli, with a 
leaven of his old-time radicalism left, enjoyed, as 
one having a profound sense of the ridiculous, 
the perplexity of his ducal and baronial partisans; 



BEACONSFIELD. 105 

he may have felt a sweetness of revenge — revenge 
for all those slights and sneers of years gone by 
— when he thrust so unwelcome a morsel down 
their throats. 

He showed them that the choice lay between 
conceding household suffrage and perpetual, or at 
least long-continued, ostracism from the delights 
of office. He cajoled, flattered, threatened them 
by turns ; and at last convinced a majority of the 
most haughty cabinet that has sat in Downing 
Street for half a century to take what Lord Derby 
so pathetically called " a leap in the dark." Derby 
himself reluctantly gave way before his colleague's 
enthusiasm ; and the Dukes of Marlborough, 
Richmond, and « Buckingham, followed his exam- 
ple. Of the cabinet, three members alone — Lords 
Salisbury and Carnarvon, and General Peel — re- 
fused to take the " leap," and retired from office ; 
with them, it is probable, a motive of intense 
personal dislike to Disraeli actuated their course 
as much as their hostility to his measure. 

He smiled placidly when ' they withdrew, and 
soon proved to them that they were unnecessary 
to his success. His triumph was now secure. 
With all his oratorical tact and fluency, the au- 
thor of " Coningsby " introduced into the House 
of Commons one of the greatest achievements of 
ills romantic political life — the Household Suffrage 
Reform Bill of 1867. 

The debates that followed were prolific in 



106 BEACONSFIELD. 

brilliant displays of parliamentary eloquence. 
Gladstone, Disraeli's life-long rival, galled to see 
himself cheated of the glory of accomplishing a 
great reform, and of all men in the world by 
Disraeli, burst forth in a torrent of hot and indig- 
nant declamation, and impetuously arraigned his 
successful antagonist for political theft and pre- 
sumptuous ambition. 

Disraeli, feeling the great prize in his palm, 
kept his temper finely, coolly taunted his rival, 
and entered confidently upon the task of winning 
a hesitating and doubting House. 

Just a year after he had resumed the Ex- 
chequer, the Household Suffrage Bill was passed, 
and Disraeli was hailed as a benefactor to Eng- 
land, who had deserved well of the country, and 
was the hero of the hour. 



XV. 

It was in the autumn of this memorable year, 
1867, that repeated attacks of the gout, and rap- 
idly advancing age, admonished the chivalrous 
Tory chief, the Earl of Derby, that it was time 
for him to throw off the cares of office and the 
perplexities of power. 

For a moment there was a doubt who should 
succeed him in the great office which confers vir- 



BEACONSFIELD. 107 

tual sovereignty over the British Empire. Der- 
by's son, Lord Stanley, a young statesman of such 
conspicuous talent that he had held the seals of 
the Foreign Office in his father's cabinet, was 
thought of, and was greatly preferred by the 
high aristocratic element of the Tory party. 

But a consideration of palpable justice deter- 
mined the question. The Tories, although unwill- 
ingly, were fain to acknowledge that of all men 
Disraeli had most efficiently borne the banner of 
Toryism for a score of years. It was also true 
that of all men he alone could conduct with suc- 
cess a Tory administration. Although distrusted 
by some, hated by others, personally liked by but 
few among his prominent colleagues, his services 
had been too great in the past, his abilities too 
great at present, to be slighted. It was known 
that he would never serve except as chief. He 
had waited long and patiently — had suffered more, 
worked harder, accomplished greater results, than 
any living Tory. England, then, was but little 
surprised when it was announced that the Queen 
had summoned Disraeli to an audience, and had 
designated him as Prime-Minister of England. 

Disraeli's elevation to this lofty summit was 
remarkable in more than one respect. He was 
not the first Prime-Minister, indeed, not of aris- 
tocratic blood ; but he was the first Prime-Min- 
ister of Jewish birth ; thirty years before, he 
had cast a prophetic glance into the future, and 



108 BEACONSFIELD. 

had determined that he would one day be Prime- 
Minister. It was like the poor Swiss youth, Cla- 
viere, who, entering Paris, and happening to pass 
the Ministry of Finance, was of a sudden struck 
with the presentiment that he should some time 
be its chief ; it was like the prophecy of the old 
Creole hag to Josephine in her infancy, that she 
would one day be "more than a queen." But 
Disraeli was by no means the first Prime-Minister 
who was a man of letters. His immediate prede- 
cessor, the Earl of Derby, gave to the world an 
elegant version of Homer's Iliad. The minister 
who preceded Derby, Earl Russell, is known in 
the literary world as the author of " The Life of 
Fox," and of many able political essays. Can- 
ning, too, was a literary man. 

Of modern statesmen with whom Disraeli has 
found himself sitting in the House of Commons, 
many, perhaps a majority, of the more prominent 
were cultivators of letters. Macaulay and Bul- 
wer were members of the cabinet at different 
periods. Gladstone is only less celebrated as a 
Greek scholar and a powerful writer than as an 
orator and statesman. John Stuart Mill, one of 
the greatest of English philosophers ; Layard, 
the antiquarian ; Hughes, the author of " Tom 
Brown ; " R. Monckton Milnes, the poet ; George 
Cornewall Lewis, an elegant essayist ; and Lord 
Herbert, a man of varied literary accomj)lish- 
ments, have been found side by side with the 



BEACONSFIELD. 109 

Prime-Minister in the House of Commons during 
the past quarter of a century. Disraeli became 
Prime-Minister at the age of 62, his mind and body- 
being at the height of their vigor, his energy still 
unimpaired, and his endurance equal to that of 
the youngest man in Parliament. 



XVI. 

DiSEAELi's first term as Prime-Minister was 
brief. Having established household suffrage, 
which virtually brought a new constituency into 
existence, he found it necessary to dissolve Par- 
liament. The general election was held in the 
autumn of 1868, and resulted in an overwhelm- 
ing majority for the Liberals ; and before the new 
Parliament met, Disraeli had resigned, and Glad- 
stone had succeeded him. 

At this moment the* prospects of the Tory 
party seemed dark indeed. It looked as if they 
were doomed to a long sojourn outside the sun- 
shine of power. Few would then have predicted 
that Disraeli, who was now sixty-three, would ever 
again wield the destinies of the empire. Glad- 
stone's triumph seemed complete, and likely to be 
enduring. 

But the spirit of the Tory chief was irrepress- 
ibly buoyant, and less than ever daunted. He 



110 BEACONSFIELD. 

went jauntily to the task of leading a forlorn 
hope of opposition, and. abated not a jot of his 
vigor in attacking every weak place in the armor 
of his victorious, contemptuous, and hot-blooded 
rival. 

Unluckily for Gladstone his armor was in too 
many places vulnerable. He led a party which, 
though its majority was great, and, when united, 
was irresistible in the Commons, was divided into 
several camps and coteries, which looked upon each 
other with jealousy and suspicion. The Liberals 
were never compact and harmonious as an or- 
ganization, like the Tories ; and, while Gladstone 
held their allegiance by the splendor of his genius 
and the boldness of his measures, he was quite 
wanting in the tact and temper by which his an- 
tagonist maintained the order and discipline of 
his followers. 

The Liberal majority, therefore, decreased ev- 
ery year ; Gladstone saw it fast crumbling away ; 
and his measures, intended to keep them together, 
only had the effect to widen the breaches. 

It was while this process of disintegration was 
fast going on, that Disraeli once more displayed 
his audacity, and produced one more of those 
striking dramatic effects which have been so fre- 
quent in his political career, by visiting and de- 
livering an address in the very midst of his ene- 
my's camp, the Radical town of Manchester. Here, 
where have been born so many of the reforms 



BEACONSFIELD. HI 

which have gradually been adopted in England 
during the past half century, the vicinity of 
John Bright's home, and John Bright's former 
constituency, Disraeli ventured to sharply attack 
the cabinet of which probably three quarters of 
his audience were cordial supporters. 

He arraigned Gladstone for his missteps in do- 
mestic legislation, and the feebleness of his for- 
eign policy ; and declared that, by modifying the 
treaty of Paris to please Russia, the cabinet, " in 
the form of a congress, had guaranteed its own 
humiliation." Speaking then of the future tactics 
of the Tories, he betrayed all his own shrewdness 
as a party leader by saying : " If I may venture to 
give such a hint, let us take care not to allow our- 
selves to be made to any extent the. tools of the 
ambition or of the discontent of extreme politicians 
on either side. I will tell you what I mean. It 
may very likely be the game of the Radical party 
to try and turn out the present ministry if they 
can, and to put a Conservative government in its 
place, that Conservative government being in a 
minority ; hoping that by so doing they shall be 
able to reconstruct their own party upon a new 
platform, pledged to more extreme and more vio- 
lent measures, and then to have a cabinet formed 
of the most thorough-going Radicals. These may 
be their tactics ; but just because it is their game, 
it ought not to be ours." 

The downfall of Gladstone, owing to the melt- 



112 BEACONSFIELD. 

ing away of his once great majority, was not 
long postponed. The really fatal blow to his 
cabinet, though it did not fully take effect for a 
year, was the dissension in the Liberal ranks aroused 
by Gladstone's scheme of Irish university reform. 

In one of the great debates upon this measure 
Disraeli took a brilliant part, in which he showed 
that he still retained, in all its force, that power 
of masterly invective which, nearly thirty years 
ago, he had launched against Gladstone's political 
teacher. Sir Robert Peel. In the course of his 
speech, he drew himself up, and, riveting his eyes 
upon the restless Premier, said : 

"You have now had four years of it. You 
have despoiled churches, you have threatened 
every corporation and every endowment in the 
country. You have examined into everybody's 
affairs, you have criticised every profession and 
vexed every trade. ISTobody is certain of his 
property ; nobody knows what duties he may 
have to perform to-morrow." 

The result was the defeat of the cabinet by 
three votes. Gladstone at once resigned. Dis- 
raeli was summoned to the Queen at Windsor, as 
he was entering the House of Commons. But he 
refused to return to power and face a hostile 
House of Commons. With his wise patience, he 
was content to bide his time. With his clear 
forecast, he foresaw that, sooner or later, he should 
win the game. 



BEACONSFIELD. 113 

A year after, Gladstone, who had reluctantly- 
resumed the premiership after Disraeli's refusal, 
found that he could no longer carry on the gov- 
ernment with a party so obstreperous and unman- 
ageable as the Liberals had become. He there- 
fore suddenly dissolved Parliament early in 1874, 
and an exciting general election at once ensued. 

It was during this hot electoral contest that 
Disraeli uttered a sarcasm upon Mr. Lowe, who 
had long been one of his most persistent and viru- 
lent foes, which alike illustrates his keenness and 
his humor. It had been complained of that Lon- 
don University, which Mr. Lowe represented in 
Parliament, should have a member. Disraeli, in 
a speech at Newport, thus alluded to the matter : 
^' Were it not for me the London University would 
not have had a member. Everybody was opposed 
to it. My colleagues did not much like it ; the 
Conservative party did not much like it ; but, 
more strange than anything else, the whole Liberal 
party were ready to oppose it. But I, with char- 
acteristic magnanimity, said to myself, * Unless 
I give a member to the London University Mr. 
Lowe cannot have a seat.' It was then impossible 
for him, and probably still is, to show himself 
upon any hustings with safety to his life. I said 
to myself, ' There is so much ability lost to Eng- 
gland,' and I pique myself always upon upholding 
and supporting ability in every party, and wher- 
ever I meet it ; and I also said to myself, ' One 
8 



114 BEACONSriELD. 

must have an eye to tlie main chance. If I keep 
Mr. Lowe in public life — and this is his only- 
chance — I make sure that no cabinet, if it be 
brought into power by an overwhelming majority, 
can long endure and long flourish if he be a mem- 
ber of it ; ' and, gentlemen, I think what took place 
perfectly justified my prescience." 

He had good reason to assume this tone of not 
ill-natured jocularity ; for the signs in the politi- 
cal heavens were full of auguries favorable to a 
great Tory triumph. To Disraeli's exultation, and 
Gladstone's indignant dismay, the country sent to 
the new House a Tory majority of sixty ; and 
Disraeli once more, in the spring of 18T4, became 
Prime-Minister of England, which office he has 
continued to hold from that day to this. 



XVII. 



As Prime-Minister, Disraeli has been still res- 
olute, dramatic, brilliant, impressing his own 
forcible character upon any measure ; bold in the 
conception and execution of policies ; masterly in 
party leadership ; patient under the most violent 
vituperation ; delighting in the full exercise of 
the power which the command of a large majority 
of both Houses of Parliament has enabled him to 
wield from first to last. 



BEACONSFIELD. 115 

His premiership, like his early public career, 
has been a political romance. Who else, in all 
the long roll of British statesmanship, would have 
produced such startling surprises, such scenic, 
effects, such audacious transformations ? To pur- 
chase a controlling share in the Suez Canal, to 
hail the Queen as Empress of India, to send the 
fleet into the waters of Constantinople, to acquire 
Cyprus, were acts of daring, which only a coura- 
geous and self-confident spirit, fond of striking 
displays of power, could have successfully exe- 
cuted. 

The period of his power fell upon dangerous 
and perplexing times. The skeleton in the closet 
of Europe, the Eastern question, reappeared to 
bring terror into every court and cabinet council. 
A timid statesman might well have shrunk from 
confronting it. To lay this periodically-appearing 
phantom was a task which a statesman, doubtful 
of himself, might well have sought to avoid. 

But Disraeli, amid a storm of popular denun- 
ciation, went to this task jauntily, with a "light 
heart ; " the fruit of his policy was the treaty 
of Berlin ; and he transformed the unpopularity 
with which he seemed at one time about to be 
overwhelmed into something very like adulation. 
" On all hands," says an English writer, " his 
name was coupled with disparaging epithets, and 
his personal character assailed with the grossest 
calumny. Even the journals of his own party — 



116 BEACONSFIELD. 

confessedly not the most intelligent organs of 
public opinion in existence — wavered in their al- 
legiance, and when he announced plainly that the 
* interests of England ' held the first place in his 
mind, there was a general outcry against his insensi- 
bility to the enthusiasm of humanity. Gradually, 
but certainly, however, public opinion veered in 
the direction of the statesman who has best in 
this century exemplified the truth of Mr. Carlyle's 
favorite proposition that, if ' speech is silvern, si- 
lence is golden.' Without any striving or crying 
out, without any public meetings or letters to the 
journals, or post-cards to anxious constituents. 
Lord Beaconsfield succeeded in winning the peo- 
ple of this country over to his side. By a policy 
equally bold and prudent, he secured the support of 
the nation ; and when the prospects of an amicable 
settlement of existing diificulties appeared to be 
darkest, he took a step which drove from his side 
the two weakest members of his cabinet, and left 
him free to pursue the courageous line of action 
which has given to this country the greatest treaty 
since the peace of Utrecht — a treaty which as- 
sures the interests of England in the Ottoman 
Empire, which provides for the safety and good 
government of the Christian subjects of the Porte, 
and which guarantees, as never has been guaran- 
teed before, our Indian Empire against Russian 
aggression." 

It was undoubtedly a proud day when, in the 



BEACONSFIELD. 117 

early winter of 1877, Benjamin Disraeli walked 
up the aisle of tlie House of Lords, enveloped in 
the robes and bearing upon his head the coronet 
of an earl. Of all the events of his checkered 
career, this was perhaps the most remarkable and 
the most gratifying to his imaginative nature. To 
be an hereditary peer of the realm ; to sit as an 
equal beside the proud nobles who had once so 
contemptuously scorned and snubbed him ; to 
outrank patricians who could trace their descent 
from the barons of William the !N'orman ; to be 
the visible leader and chief of archbishops, dukes, 
and marquises ; to find himself the principal per- 
sonage in the haughtiest assembly in the world : 
this was glory enough to satisfy even his vast am- 
bition. Nor was this the last of the dazzling titu- 
lar honors which his toils and triumphs have won. 
When he returned from the Prussian capital, where 
he had been the central and conspicuous figure, and 
by his voice had made the authority of England 
felt in the most distinguished conclave of modern 
times, as impressively as did Gortchakoff that of 
Russia, and Bismarck that of Germany, he was 
welcomed back to London with such a demonstra- 
tion as had not been seen since Wellington re- 
turned from Waterloo. 

The Queen, summoning him to Osborne, con- 
ferred upon him that Order of the Garter which 
is an object coveted by the most illustrious of 
England's nobles. 



118 BEACONSFIELD. 

It is a suggestive fact that Disraeli, transferred 
to the serener arena of the House of Lords, did 
not thereby lose any of the personal power and 
influence which he so long wielded in the more 
popular and more authoritative House. When 
William Pitt became Earl of Chatham, and Rob- 
ert Walpole became Earl of Orford, they were 
the shorn Samsons of British politics. When a 
commoner is transferred to the peers, he is usually 
regarded as "laid on the shelf." 

It has not been so with the present Premier. 
The Earl of Beaconsfield is as much the real, 
moving head of the cabinet and of Parliament as 
was Disraeli. Their policy is still emphatically 
his policy. It is his hand that is always on the 
rudder of the ship of state ; the impress of his 
peculiar, energetic, audacious mind is on every 
great public act. 

He has, besides, during a period in which he 
has been assailed with a degree of persistent 
ferocity and denunciation such as few English 
statesmen have ever had to encounter, not only 
maintained his majority in the House of Com- 
mons, but he has increased it. He was much 
stronger after he had been in power for four 
years than when he first assumed it ; and this is 
one of the rarest things in the history of British 
politics. 

His achievements as Premier, indeed, are enough 
to establish the fame of any one statesman. " He 



BEACONSFIELD. 119 

began life," says a recent writer, "under almost 
every conceivable disadvantage. He was the rep- 
resentative of an unpopular race and the advocate 
of an eminently unpopular political creed ; in later 
years lie has been in opposition to two of the most 
popular of English statesmen ; and yet, in spite 
of every difficulty, he has contrived to live down 
his opponents, and by dint of patience, courage, 
inexhaustible temper, and knowledge of the world, 
to reconstruct the old national party of England, 
and to restore her waning prestige. Still, it may 
be open to question whether posterity will recog- 
nize him by the title he has adopted. Bacon is 
Bacon to the end of the chapter, and never Lord 
Verulam ; the Great Commoner is Pitt, and never 
the Earl of Chatham. So probably will it be now. 
His country will remember the Earl of Beacons- 
field by the name by which he was known during 
so many years of struggle and difficulty, rather 
than by the title with which he strove to identify 
himself in the eyes of his neighbors with his * per- 
fect wife.' The desire to do so was unquestiona- 
bly natural, but to the people of that country 
which he has served so faithfully and loved so 
well the chief of the Tory party will be always 
not Lord Beaconsfield, but Benjamin Disraeli." 



120 BEACONSFIELD. 



XVIIL 



The personal appearance of a famous man, the 
way lie looks and a,cts, Ms peculiarities, attitudes, 
mannerisms, are always interesting, and serve to 
complete the picture of Ms character. The idea 
conceived of him is clearer and more precise if 
his person is described ; we feel that we know 
him better ; his image is more distinct in the 
mind's eye. 

How Disraeli looked and dressed and bore 
himself when he was the young and brilliant 
profege of Gore House, we have already seen« 
As he advances in years, we get here and there a 
glimpse of him through those who observed and 
have written of him from time to time. 

" His external appearance," says Smiles, writ- 
ing in 1860, when Disraeli was fifty-five, "is very 
characteristic. A face of ashy paleness, large 
dark eyes, curling black hair, a stooping gait, an 
absorbed look, a shuffling walk — these are his ex- 
ternal marks ; and, once seen, you will not fail to 
remember Disraeli. There is something unusual, 
indeed quite foreign, in his appearance ; you 
could not by any possibility mistake him for a 
^axon. Notwithstanding his position, he is an 
exceedingly isolated being. He makes no inti- 
mates, has few personal friends ; he seems to be 



BEACONSFIELD. 121 

lonely and self-isolated, feeding upon his own 
thoughts." 

" Disraeli is full of pluck and vigor this ses- 
sion," wrote Justin McCarthy in 1871, " quite 
jubilant and confident. He still looks wonder- 
fully young, despite his awkward, shuffling, slink- 
ing walk, and his stooped shoulders. A few 
evenings since I saw him pass along Parliament 
Street, leaning on two friends. Everybody looked 
after him. He is a much more remarkable figure 
in the street than Gladstone or Bright. Let me 
describe him as he then showed : 

" A tall man, with stooped and rounded shoul- 
ders ; a peculiarly-shaped head, fast denuding it- 
self of hair, but with the hair that remains still 
black as ever ; a complexion of dull brick-dust ; 
a face puckered up like an old mask, or as if the 
wearer of the face were always screwing up his 
lips to whistle, and never accomplished the feat. 
A small chin-tuft adorns the countenance ; and 
let me add that the expression on the countenance 
is lugubrious enough to become an artistic and 
conscientious mute at a funeral. 

"A long gray or white outer coat reaches 
nearly to the ankles of this remarkable figure, and 
beneath the coat might be seen trousers of a dark 
gray, and very neat boots. There was something 
of the air of a decayed and fading dandy about 
the entire personage, which, joined with the odd 
walk, and the stooped shoulders, and the chill 



122 BEACONSFIELD. 

gray atmospliere of tlie early evening, diffused a 
sense of gloom over tlie meditative spectator. 

" Was this, then, the brilliant, eccentric, and 
dashing man of genius, who used to be the cynosure 
of eyes in Lady Blessington's bright salons, who 
wrote * Vivian Grey,' and came out as a wild rad- 
ical, and proclaimed that revolution was hi^ forte, 
and challenged O'Connell to a duel, and heard the 
chimes ever so long past midnight with the elder- 
ly gentleman now vegetating at Chiselhurst, who 
was then Prince Louis Napoleon ? 

" Yes, that was he. ' There goes old Dizzy,' 
said a working man, as the great politician, ro- 
mancist, and adventurer, shuffled along." 

In the following year he appeared as follows 
to an observant writer : 

" A man of middle height, of spare but well- 
proportioned frame, of scrupulous neatness of 
dress, arid possessed of a countenance which no 
one can forget who has once looked upon it — this 
is Disraeli, as we see him now quietly walk- 
ing up the floor of the House to take his place on 
the front Opposition bench. 

" Arrived at his seat, he removes his hat — he 
alone among the gentlemen upon that bench — 
and sits down, folding his arms and stretching 
out his legs in a fashion which recalls by-gone 
days, when, out of every twenty honorable gen- 
tlemen in the House, nineteen of them stretched 
out their legs in exactly the same way. 



BEACONSFIELD. 123 

"Over the high-arched forehead — surely the 
forehead of a poet — there hangs from the crown 
of the head a single curl of dark hair, a curl 
which you cannot look at without feeling a touch 
of pathos in your inmost heart, for it is the only 
thing about the worn and silent man reminding 
you of the brilliant youth of 'Vivian Grey.' 

" The face below this solitary lock is deeply 
marked with the furrows left by care's plough- 
share ; the fine dark eyes look downward, the 
mouth is closed with a firmness that says more for 
this man's tenacity of will than pages of eulogy 
would do ; but what strikes you more than any- 
thing else is the utter lack of expression upon the 
countenance. 

" 'No one looking at the face, though but for 
a moment, could fall into the error of supposing 
that expression and intelligence are not there ; 
they are there, but in concealment. 

" Much is said of the power possessed by Na- 
poleon III. of hiding his thoughts from the keen- 
est scrutiny ; but more than once even his power 
over his countenance has been sorely taxed, and 
he has been glad of the grateful shelter of the 
curling mustache that shades his mouth. 

"Without any such help, however, Disraeli 
has a face that is simply inscrutable. Again 
and again have hundreds of keen eyes been turned 
at critical moments toward that face, to read, if 
it might be possible, something of the thoughts 



124 BEACONSFIELD. 

of the man himself ; but never once, not even in 
the most exciting crisis of personal or political 
conflict, has the face unwittingly relaxed, or friend 
or foe been able to read aught there. 

" It is the face of a sphinx, inscrutable and 
unfathomable ; it is, as men of every party will 
admit, the most remarkable face in England. 

" We have dwelt thus long upon it because, 
by its very absence of outward expression, it 
gives a clew to the general character of the man 
himself. It is not for us to attempt to sound the 
depths of his soul. They are beyond the reach of 
our plummet, nay, of any plummet that has yet 
been dropped into them. There have been many 
men — a few friends, a vast number of foes — who 
have imagined that they have dived down into 
the innermost recesses of Disraeli's nature, and- 
who have come to the surface again to tell us 
about everything that they saw there, to explain 
every hidden motive, each smothered passion, 
and to reduce the man himself to a mere piece of 
mechanism — an automaton chess-player — whose 
motive power, and springs, and wheels, and wires, 
are to be discovered by any one who will take 
the trouble to look for them. We intend to be 
guilty of no such folly. 

" Disraeli's mind is no more to be analyzed than 
his countenance is to be fathomed. He is here ; 
we know what he has done, we have seen his la- 
bors, we acknowledge his genius, we believe him 



BEACONSFIELD. 125 

to be intellectually one of the greatest men not of 
his own time only but of all English history. Be- 
yond that we cannot go, and we must leave to 
future critics, who will see him through a clearer 
medium than that through which it is possible for 
us to behold him, and who may have new lights 
thrown upon his character which are withheld 
from us, to decide what he is, and what precisely 
is the motive power of his life. All that we know 
at present is that he is an intellectual prodigy, 
and, like other prodigies, he must be tried by ex- 
ceptional rules and standards." 

A graphic picture of Disraeli, as he appeared 
in the House of Commons seven or eight years 
ago, is thus given by Ewing Ritchie : 

" Seated on the Opposition benches, half-way 
down, with some small-brained son of a duke by 
his side, night after night, may be seen the leader 
of Her Majesty's Opposition. Generally, his eyes 
are cast down, his hands are crossed in front, and 
he has all the appearance of a statue. Cold, pas- 
sionless, he seems of an alien race — a stranger to 
the hopes, and fears, and interests of a British 
House of Commons. However fierce the debate, 
or heated the House, or pressing the crisis, there 
sits Disraeli, occasionally looking at his hands, or 
the clock — otherwise silent, unmoved, and still. 
Yet an Indian scout could not keep a more vigi- 
lant watch ; and, immediately an opportunity oc- 
curs, he is on his legs, boiling with real or affected 
indignation." 



126 BEACONSFIELD. 



XIX. 



In private character, Disraeli is known for Ms 
social accomplisliments, his equable and amiable 
temper, Ms freedom from anything like hauteur, 
his courtesy to every one, and an air of quiet dig- 
nity which is very far from repelling the advances 
of those who come in contact with him. 

One of his most hostile and most caustic crit- 
ics says of him : " Disraeli, in private, is much 
liked. He is very kindly ; he is a good friend ; 
he is sympathetic in his dealings with young poli- 
ticians, and is always glad to give a helping hand 
to a young man of talent. Personal ambition, 
which, in Mr. Bright's eyes, is something despica- 
ble, and which Mr. Gladstone probably regards 
as a sin, is, in Disraeli's acceptation, something 
generous and elevating, something to be fostered 
and encouraged. Therefore, young men of talent 
admire Disraeli, and are glad and proud to gather 
around him. " 

" Of Disraeli's personal qualities," says a more 
friendly observer, " apart from those which he 
displays as a debater, a party-leader, or a states- 
man, this is not the place in which to say much. 
l!^evertheless, it is bare justice to a man who has 
been the subject of a severer and more merciless 
criticism than any of his contemporaries, to point 



BEACONSFIELD. 127 

to one or two of the most prominent traits of his 
private character. Watching him in his public 
career, he always strikes one as a man of singular 
reserve ; a man having few confidential friends, 
and seldom indulging in free intercourse even 
with his immediate colleagues. 

" The popular impression of him, indeed, is that 
he is a man without friends, laboring alone, and 
holding himself aloof from those who are his nat- 
ural allies. We believe this impression is an en- 
tirely niistaken one. It is, at any rate, certain 
that, personally, Disraeli is one of the most popu- 
lar men in the House of Commons, winning upon 
politicians of all shades of opinion by his never- 
failing courtesy, by his generosity toward those 
who are beginning their political career, and by 
the utter absence of anything like personal vanity 
in his character. Nor is it unworthy of remark 
that toward Gladstone he has always shown a de- 
gree of personal esteem, and of actual generosity, 
which has never been requited by the latter as 
fully as we could have wished. 

"What the reason of this apparent want of 
generosity on Gladstone's part may be, it is diffi- 
cult to tell. Assuredly, Gladstone is not, as a 
rule, cold or ungenerous toward his rivals or op- 
ponents, but there is in his bearing toward Dis- 
raeli an unquestionable coldness which has often 
puzzled those who know him best. To us it seems 
in some degree to be accounted for by the fact 



128 BEACONSFIELD. 

that Gladstone entertains some doubt as to the 
sincerity of Disraeli's convictions. 

" But, if that be so, his conduct is, to say the 
least, inconsistent. There are other men whose 
convictions are much more open to suspicion than 
Disraeli's, toward whom he shows none of this 
coldness. How high the personal feud between 
these two great statesmen has sometimes risen 
will be remembered by those who can recall one 
memorable occasion when Disraeli congratulated 
himself on the fact that the ponderous table of 
the House separated and in a measure protected 
him from his rival. Yet it is bare justice to Glad- 
stone to recall another occasion when Disraeli, un- 
der, as it then appeared, the imminent pressure 
of a severe domestic affliction, was manifestly 
touched by the feeling and delicacy with which 
his great opponent alluded to his position. We 
only wish that such displays of mutual good-feel- 
ing were more common than they are. 

" The great Conservative leader is a poet as 
well as a statesman. In the lightness of his fancy, 
in the depth of his feeling for the sufferings of 
others, in the catholicity of his sympathies, in his 
fine imaginative powers, and in his ability to in- 
vest the homeliest of topics with something of ro- 
mance and of beauty, he gives proof of the pure 
vein of poetry hidden somewhere in his nature." 

The Kew York World of November 1st, in 
giving a cable dispatch from London, correcting 



BEACONSFIELD. 129 

a report from that city that Lord Beaconsfield 
had had an attack of epilepsy, adds from its 
English correspondence the following interesting 
sketch of his country seat in Buckinghamshire, 
Hughenden Manor : 

"In his home at Hughenden what he most 
values would seem to be the privacy it insures 
him, and the sylvan seclusion with which it sur- 
rounds him when he seeks refuge there from the 
battle of life in London. Hughenden Manor is 
the estate not of an English earl exactly, for it 
yields at the most an income of some £1,500 ster- 
ling only a year, but of an English country gen- 
tleman ; and it is no secret that the lord of Hugh- 
enden has throughout his career been notably 
earnest in asserting his right to be regarded as a 
person having roots in the English soil. The af- 
front which he has always most sharply resented 
has been to speak of him as an * adventurer,' for 
nothing could be more unjust, though many Eng- 
lish writers not unfriendly to him have offered 
him this affront in perfect good faith. So little 
is known of Disraeli the man that a loose notion 
is common throughout England of his having ob- 
tained Hughenden through his marriage with Mrs. 
Wyndham Lewis, the widow of a Gloucestershire 
land-owner, and of his having in this way anchored 
himself for the first time in English ground. ][^oth- 
ing could be further from the truth. In the archi- 
tectural section of the South Kensington Museum 



130 BEACOFSFIELD. 

you may see any day a singularly beautiful screen 
of carved brick- work tracery, unrivaled in Eng- 
land, which formerly constituted the central part 
of the fa9ade of a house which stood where the 
Great Eastern Railway Station now stands in En- 
field, and which was the residence from 1766 to 
to 1804 of Isaac Disraeli, the father of Lord Bea- 
consfield. It was one of the finest of the many fine 
old houses which made Enfield famous in its way 
long before the rifle-factories came there, and it 
was a mere chance connected with his marriage 
which led Isaac Disraeli to leave it just in time 
to rob Enfield of the glory of giving birth to his 
now illustrious son. When Benjamin Disraeli 
issued his first election address he was able to 
speak of himself as a land-owner in Berks, and to 
date it from 'Bradenham House.' This house, 
built by William Lord Windsor, and visited by 
Queen Elizabeth on her return from Oxford in 
1566, was long the home of Isaac Disraeli, who 
received there some of the best society of his day, 
and who now lies buried in Bradenham Church, 
under a handsome monument. It was Isaac Dis- 
raeli, too, who obtained Hughenden by fair pur- 
chase, though he did not buy the whole area of 
about two thousand acres included in the existing 
domain. Lord Beaconsfield, in fact, is quite as 
much of an Englishman and of an English squire 
by birth and descent as Lord Romilly, for instance, 
and much more of both than was the late, Lord 



BEACONSFIELD. 131 

Lyndhurst. Yet nothing could be more unlike 
an Englisliman's or an English squire's enjoyment 
of a 'landed position' than Lord Beaconsfield's 
life at Hughenden. He has covers for game as 
good as may be found in Buckinghamshire, but 
he never shoots ; he is in a good hunting country, 
if a little hilly, but he never follows a fox ; he 
has a home 'bosomed high in tufted trees,' but 
he never led a pleasure party in among the 
beeches. But little company comes for him to 
the station of the little chair-making town of 
High Wycombe (or High Wykeham — you may 
spell it either way provided Only you are careful 
never to pronounce it as you write it). What- 
ever gayety of the great flourishes here is by the 
grace of his neighbor, the newly-married Lord 
Carington, who was the Earl of Rosebery's best 
man last spring, and whose seat, 'The Abbey,' 
lies a little south of Wycombe on the Marlow 
road. For there is very little for company to do 
at Hughenden, which, by-the-way, these wonder- 
ful rustics choose to call ' Hitchendon.' English- 
men in these days will not long endure a coun- 
try house without sport. The lord of Hughenden 
has learned much and feigned more to please 
them, but he will not 'pay with his person,' as 
the French say, for their admiration. He has 
drawn the line at the arts of riding across country 
and of handling the rod and the gun. This makes 
him the most extraordinary, the most uncanny 



132 BEACONSFIELD. 

squire, perhaps, except tliat mad grandee of Spain, 
Bethell Walrond, who ever held a rood of Eng- 
lish ground. To this day the neighborhood pro- 
fesses itself just as unable to make him out as 
Landor's vicinage was to get along with that 
strange poet at Llanthony. Lord Beaconsfield, 
unlike Landor, is admired ; he is even rather pop- 
ular, for he is the most lenient because the most 
indifferent of landlords, but he is not in the least 
understood. What a pity, the rural folk seem to 
say to themselves, that he should have wellnigh 
all knowledge, except that supreme part of it 
which is necessary to social salvation and which 
is treated of in those supplementary chapters of 
the British Bible, the ' Sportsman's Pocket-Book ' 
and the ' Country Gentleman's Guide ! ' For his 
part he lives among them like a foreigner on the 
lands he has conquered — as far removed from all 
participation in their local pleasures as an Eng- 
lishman would be, settled among the Hindoos. 
One feature of Hughenden is supremely significant 
on this point. Nearly all the paths cut through 
the woods of the estate are drives, not walks, nor 
even bridle-roads. The Earl of Beaconsfield's 
way of getting from distant point to point is a 
pony-carriage. A ' real English ' nobleman might 
indeed be found taking his exercise in a vehicle of 
that description, but it would be only because he 
had the gout upon him or had broken his leg ! 
Lord Beaconsfield's early enemy, the late Duke 



BEACONSFIELD. 133 

of Rutland, used to go shooting even when he 
was lamed with the gout, on a shaggy, vicious 
little pony. High Wycombe is reached by a rail- 
way ride of an hour and a half from London. As 
you leave the station you strike the Hughenden 
road at once, and in a very few minutes you come 
in sight of a white house-top peeping out of a 
dense plantation or natural wood. That is Hugh- 
enden Manor in its hiding-place of trees. The 
woodland is flanked by a wide stretch of meadow, 
and both are fenced in, so that you must pass the 
meadow gates to reach the park, and pass the 
park gates to reach the house. And even the 
first outwork is not to be lightly carried, as you 
may infer from the warning, 'Trespassers will 
be prosecuted,' set up almost at the outermost 
gate. But be not alarmed ! These frowning 
syllables mean no more than such warnings usual- 
ly do. Even the inner sanctum of foliage swarms 
with trespassers in the wild strawberry season. 
The estate is then invaded by the urchins of the 
district, who suffer no severer punishment than is 
involved in the stony stare of their sovereign's 
Prime-Minister when he happens to come upon 
them in a raid. The mere grass land is comfort- 
less in the extreme in its aspect ; it is only when 
you pass the second gate that you come upon the 
trim and ordered beauty of a private park. The 
abundance of timber has given the landscape gar- 
dener splendid material to work upon. Here he 



134 BEACONSMELD. 

has cleared a glade and there a little amphitheatre, 
and at needful distances for effect he has varied 
the greens and browns of the grass and the trees 
with patches of all the colors in which God has 
painted the flowers of the field. It is a very, very 
pretty place, and it is a pity that the house should 
be there to spoil it. For the house does spoil it. 
Hughenden Manor was once a not unpleasing 
eighteenth-century mansion of red brick. It never 
had many pretensions to architectural effect, but 
it might have ' passed muster ' if it had been 
left in its original state. In an evil hour years 
ago, however, the owner took it into his head 
to have it smartened up ' for company,' and with 
his connivance a local genius whitened it all 
over with paint or lime color to that end. It 
now in consequence resembles a model factory 
rather more than anything else, and may be 
taken as another signal proof that the owner 
could not be quite English if he tried, though 
where he is under no obligation he does not care 
to try. The lawn, with its richly variegated 
flower-beds, tends somewhat to modify the de- 
pressing effect of the house, and the interior of 
the house soon makes you entirely forgetful of 
the exterior. Once within the doors, you see at a 
glance with what manner of man you have to 
deal. It is a house of memories rather than of 
tastes. The place is a positive museum of por- 
traits, and most of these, as they represent the 



BEACONSFIELD. 135 

friends of the owner's youth, are portraits of the 
dead and gone. The pictures begin at the hall 
door, they line the staircase walls, they overflow 
into every chamber and antechamber, and there 
is hardly one of them that is not a personal me- 
mento ; of landscapes, genre pictures, historical 
and ideal paintings, there are few or none. There 
is something pathetic and almost painful in this 
presence of so many faces that will never more 
greet Lord Beaconsfield with anything warmer 
than their pictured smiles. Here in the low-ceiled 
entry is Edward Lytton Bulwer in the day of his 
dandyism, a picture as carefully wrought out by 
the painter in boots and cuffs and collar as in the 
fine brow above them. Here is Lyndhurst, the 
great Tory Lord Chancellor, who was a friend 
and patron of Mr. Disraeli when Lord Beacons- 
field was in urgent need of such countenance to 
commend him even to the attention of the party 
which now lives and moves in him. This por- 
trait was painted by the young Disraeli's idol, 
D'Orsay, and opposite to it hangs the effigy of 
the artist and the idol himself — the Crichton of 
his time, the best dresser, the brightest wit, the 
most accomplished swordsman, painter, equestrian, 
and general highflyer perhaps ever seen in London 
society, and withal, as tradition assures us, the 
handsomest man, not only of a season, but of an 
epoch. It is conclusive as to his power that he 
should have enchanted one who has since been 



136 BEACONSFIELD. 

recognized as the chief of enchanters, Disraeli 
himself. The young worshiper sat at his feet. 
There was nothing he would not have done for 
this glittering idol. There was, indeed, nothing 
he did not do for him. One chief secret of his 
early impecuniosity 'is now known ; he gave up 
the ready money left him by his father, some 
thousands of pounds, to help to pay D'Orsay's 
debts. It was but a drop in that ocean of lia- 
bility, but it helped his hero through one bad 
quarter of an hour, and with that the devotee was 
content. Another canvas only separates D'Orsay 
from the Countess of Blessington — a brunette 
radiant with youthful beauty. Social history will 
always couple these two names together, and 
in its own way — though to the day of his death 
D'Orsay most solemnly swore that the mother of 
his unhappy wife was no more to him than a 
mother or a much-loved friend. Disraeli made 
his social debut in London in the Blessington cir- 
cle, and his associates there were the brightest 
men (the women never approached her) known to 
the world of her hour. 

" A portrait of the young Disraeli, taken at this 
period, is to be seen up-stairs at Hughenden. A 
portrait of the Disraeli of to-day, copied from 
one painted but the other day for the Queen, is to 
be seen below. The difference is as saddening as 
it is striking. The earlier portrait is in the high 
Byronio manner. We have a drawing-room cor- 



BEACONSFIELD. 137 

Bair before us, with flasliing eye, flowing locks, 
and an expression of wild devil-may-careishness 
carried out in it to the very twist of the tie. 
This was the Disraeli of the past, in one incarna- 
tion of fashion. In the other — the Beaconsfield 
of to-day — all the suppleness of line has vanished 
out of face and dress, the more obviously because 
the cheek is close-shaven. You feel yourself in 
the presence of a ' very hard customer,' v\^ho has 
parted with every illusion, and who no longer be- 
lieves, with the original of the earlier picture, 
that life is an easy matter, to be carried with a 
rush. What the second face has gained, in the 
look of worldly wisdom, fails to make up, per- 
haps, for what it has lost in the look of confidence 
and hope. ISTear this later portrait hangs a still 
stronger contrast — the face of Byron, with its 
almost fabulous purity of classic outline. The 
original of this portrait, as everybody knows, was 
another of the young Disraeli's heroes, and the 
enthusiasm of his early admiration has survived 
to old age, as Lord Beaconsfield recently showed 
when he headed a movement for erecting a statue 
to the great English poet in the capital which has 
commemorated so many meaner and less-enduring 
fames than his. The genius of Byron, like that 
of Disraeli, was passionate rather than reflective. 
Disraeli's earliest successes may be almost de- 
scribed as a result of the application of the By- 
ronic method to politics. Let Mr. Lowe say 



138 BEACONSFIELD. 

what he will of the 'slatternly inaccuracy' of 
his rival's thought, its volume of fire has often 
more than made up for its lack of precision with 
an English multitude. ISTear Byron hangs Sir 
[N'athaniel Rothschild, in his uniform of a yeo- 
manry captain, the picture of a dandy who would 
be a perfect type of the British ofiicer but for his 
swarthy face. The Rothschilds are Lord Beacons- 
field's best and oldest friends. There is more than 
a community of race between them — there is a 
community of defiance to the prejudices of creed. 
They have made a social pact with Christendom 
— the Prime-Minister, of course, has gone even 
further than that — and the Rothschilds are now 
allying themselves with the best blood not only 
in the English but in the French aristocracy, to 
the great scandal of old-fashioned orthodoxy 
among the Jews. It is a kind of new dispensa- 
tion, of which no hint is to be found in either the 
law or the prophets as they are read in the syna- 
gogues, but which obtains its sufficient sanction 
in society's approving smile. 

" The staircase leads us to a dressing-room filled 
with more art treasures — a singularly fine collec- 
tion of the engravings of Bartolozzi, whom Isaac 
Disraeli knew very well when he lived near Rich- 
ardson's old home at North End. These things, 
however, may indicate rather the taste of the 
father than the taste of the son. Beyond the 
dressing-room is a little narrow slip of a chamber. 



BEACONSFIELD. 139 

lined on one side with book-shelves. In this room 
the secretaries of the Premier's secretaries work 
during the two or three months of the year in 
which the business of state is carried on at Hugh- 
enden instead of in the old official residence in 
Downing Street. Lord Beaconsfield's favorite 
and most trusted private secretary, Mr. Montagu 
Corry, who is not only his secretary but his de- 
voted personal friend, of course works with his 
chief in a small study on this landing, in which 
portraits of Isaac Disraeli and his wife look down, 
as in a happy dream, from the mantel-piece on the 
world-embracing labors of their son. You must 
come down again to the lower floor for the best 
rooms in the house. The dining-room may be 
reckoned among these by virtue of its uses, but 
in no other respect. It is as bare and comfortless 
almost as a monastic refectory, and resembles one 
rather than a convivial chamber. 

"In the matter of gastronomy, Disraeli has 
always been as careless and abstemious as an 
Arab. His official dinners, from the time when 
he first became Chancellor of the Exchequer, are 
remembered with a sort of anguish by all the 
hons vivants who were compelled to go through 
with them. A story still goes the rounds of the 
first of these banquets, at which one course after 
another came upon the table either tepid or frigid, 
chilly fish following cold soup, and a lukewarm 
roast supervening, until the time of the ices came, 



140 BEACONSFIELD. 

when appeared a leaning tower of Pisa, toppling 
to its fall in a pool of deliquescent rosy cream. 
' Thank Heaven ! ' murmured a discontented guest, 
in a stage-whisper, 'there's something warm, at 
last!' 

" The style of the Hughenden dining-room is 
Gothic, but, unfortunately, it is what may be called 
the secondary Walpolian Gothic of thirty or forty 
years ago. The oak sideboard is the best thing 
in the room, but that is so much like a communion 
table that it must seem indecent to decant any- 
thing upon it but sacramental wine. It stands in 
a side chapel rather than a common recess — the 
taste of a former occupant of the house having 
led him to reproduce a bit of the architecture of 
his college at Oxford on this part of the building. 
One wall is adorned with medallions in marble, 
brought from Pompeii — character sketches, if not 
caricatures, of the great ones of the old city. The 
other walls would be quite bare but for the slen- 
der lines of oak paneling which run from ceiling 
to floor. The comfort which we are taught to 
look for in every English home is found for the 
first time in the library. This apartment is half 
a library and half a drawing-room. There are 
plenty of tomes, but no dust. The light is abun- 
dant, and it falls as often on brilliant hangings as 
on sober bindings ; and evidently no hangings 
are too brilliant for the taste of the occupant. 
Rich Oriental yellows predominate in the decora- 



BEACONSFIELD. 141 

tions, but there is an Oriental harmony in the fit- 
tings of the apartment, taken as a whole. The 
bookbinder's lines of gold on the volumes here 
and there catch up and carry out the color, as an 
artist would say, from one end of the room to the 
other, and the place is filled with bits of bric-a- 
brac which serve the same end. Yonder huge 
knife in its case of gold is one of the owner's 
memorials of Eastern travel. He was but a boy 
then, and he had a marked boy's taste for these 
glittering toys. Copies of the Revue des Deux 
Mondes^ lying on the table, show if not the tastes 
at least the necessities of his maturer age. These 
two numbers are the very last books he has been 
consulting. The paper-knife marks them. The 
reader has but just left them, to take them up 
again when he returns to the room. Evidently, 
the hero of the Berlin Congress desires to see 
what his neighbors think of his Eastern policy — 
who was it put about the story that Lord Bea- 
consfield knows no French? Another lie gone 
the way of the rest ! Here, as everywhere in this 
interesting but melancholy house, are pictures of 
friends dead and gone. That of the poet Rogers 
hanging by the mantel -piece is but a pencil- 
sketch, amateurish, yet not without merit. It at 
least does full justice to that nose and chin which, 
according to Byron, 'would shame a knocker.' 
Rogers was a very early friend of Disraeli, per- 
haps his earliest. It was he who took the boy to 



142 BEACONSFIELD. 

be baptized, at St. Andrew's, Holborn, and, in 
thus giving bim his start in Protestant Christi- 
anity, gave him also his start in English political 
life. There are other sketches, more amateurish 
still, of which the master of the house is the sub- 
ject, as he appeared when receiving an honorary 
degree at a Scotch university. The lady who drew 
them did not spare him. They show enough 
feminine malice, if not enough artistic ability, for 
Punch. His lordship seems to be quite conscious 
how exquisitely ludicrous he looks in his baggy 
robe of dignity, and with his demure, downcast 
eye. Presentation books lie about on the tables. 
One of them, a trophy from Berlin, is a beauti- 
fully printed and as beautifully bound edition of 
the Psalms in German, weighing several pounds. 
A slip of paper thrust between the leaves says 
that it is from an admirer — there is no other clew 
to the giver's name. Xear it lies a copy of the 
parliamentary return of land-owners in England 
and Wales, the modern ^ Domesday Book ' 
brought down to date. It is handsomely bound, 
and an inscription on the cover mentions that the 
return was moved for by Mr. Disraeli. It did 
not exactly answer his purpose, which was to 
prove that the ownership of the soil of England 
was far more equably distributed among the peo- 
ple than was supposed. For, if it showed that 
Mr. Bright had monstrously overstepped the Rad- 
ical case, it also showed that the few have too 



BEACONSFIELD. 143 

much land and the many too little. Perhaps Mr. 
Disraeli had better have left it alone. But he 
has never troubled himself much about deluges 
in the great hereafter. 

" From the library we pass into the drawing- 
room, commanding, like most of the other apart- 
ments, beautiful views of the fertile uplands with 
their ridge of woods. It is very gorgeous in its 
glow of gold and yellow satin. The parqueted 
floor is in the French style. French, too, in taste, 
is the abundance of figure-subjects in old china, 
though these are mostly of Dresden ware. This 
might be called the Queen's room, for the Queen 
sat in it on her memorable visit to her favorite 
minister a year or so ago — a visit of a couple of 
hours, but it made Russia and Germany under- 
stand his hold on power, and it will be remembered 
in this rural neighborhood for ten times as many 
years. This room abounds with evidences of her 
royal favor to the man who has made her some- 
thing more than a queen, and whose enemies, in- 
deed, accuse him of making her an empress in 
England as well as in India by liberating her 
from the critical control of Parliament, and ac- 
cepting her will as the nation's law. In the place 
of honor among the pictures hangs the portrait of 
Her Majesty, painted by command. On the table 
lies a ponderously bound copy of Theodore Mar- 
tin's ' Faust,' with the inscription on the fly-leaf 
in a handwriting beautifully clear and bold : ' To 



144 BEACONSFIELD. 

Lord Beaconsfield, with many happy returns of 
the season, from Victoria, Reg. and I. {JRegma et 
Imperatrix). Christmas Eve, 1876.' Here, too, 
lies a more popular tribute, the 'pair of ivory 
carvers' (the fork almost big enough to form a 
trident for Britannia, and the knife to match) 
given by the workmen of Shef&eld in acknowl- 
edgment, as is told in an inscription on the han- 
dle, of the ' Peace with Honor ' brought back 
from Berlin. There could be no better tools for 
the dismembering of that prince of farm-yard 
birds, the turkey. Let us hope the Sheffield work- 
men never thought of this. From the drawing- 
room we may pass to the Disraeli room, a bed- 
chamber of state hung round with pictures of the 
family. There is Disraeli the elder, as a boy 
with large dark Jewish eyes, and as a man. The 
portrait of his wife, the great man's mother, is 
now a mere network of lines of decay on a cracked 
canvas. Their gifted son, too, is seen here as a 
boy and as a young man. A portrait of his grand- 
father, the Venetian, who made the family fortune 
in England more than a century and a half ago, 
completes the collection. These elders both are 
dignified figures, tending to show that 

' St. Patrick was a gentleman, 
And came of decent people.' 

" But why linger longer in the house ? A view 
of Hughenden Church, from the windows, invites 



BEACONSFIELD. 145 

us out of doors. The cliurch is old, but so bare 
of ornamentation that, were it not for that equally- 
bare pew in the chancel, * where he sits,' I grieve 
to say it would be little more interesting than the 
newest meeting-house in town. 'He' sits in no 
sort of pomp, and that is to his credit ; but for its 
position, there would be little to distinguish his 
line of board from that occupied by the worship- 
ers from his rustic almshouse at the gate. The 
Young England theory has left its mark on rural 
life, if not on political history. In the almshouse, 
the infirm poor live in the very shadow of the 
manor. It is a sort of preserve of charity, anoth- 
er of *the curiosities.' You step out of the hall 
door, and you have hardly done admiring the tame 
peacocks on the terrace before you find yourself 
wondering at still tamer men who are glad to owe 
the comfort of their evening of life to the bounty 
of their lord. Well, well, if they do not mind it, 
why should you ? The graves of the Disraeli family 
lie outside the church, at the altar end. They are 
very plain — three grass-grown spaces perfectly flat, 
or rather one broad space divided by lines of ma- 
sonry. On one side lies James Disraeli, that young- 
er brother of Lord Beaconsfield who lived and died 
in the tolerably lucrative office of a Commissioner 
of Inland Revenue. His portrait in official cos- 
tume is in the house. The face is a clew to the 
history. It is that of a mild, harmless man, with- 
out any striking gift but that best one of all — the 
10 



146 BEACONSFIELD. 

gift of knowing when one is well off. No swim- 
mer himself, this brother quietly held on to the 
other's skirts in the sea of Fortune, and with well- 
founded confidence, for Beaconsfield's stroke was 
strong enough for two. In fact, it was strong 
enough for three. Kalph Disraeli, another brother, 
owes his comfortable place also, as Clerk of the 
Parliaments, to the head of the house ; and he has 
gracefully acknowledged the debt by giving the 
name of Coningsby to his only son, born on the 
eve of Lord Beaconsfield's greatest political tri- 
umphs. On the other side of James Disraeli lies 
a stranger to the family circle, who yet has a right 
to the place. This is Mrs. Brydges-Wyllyams, of 
Torquay, a lady who made Mr. Disraeli the heir 
to her estate of some £30,000 sterling, out of her 
profound admiration for his genius. The story is 
stranger than any fiction. Mr. Disraeli years ago 
received an anonymous letter asking him to meet 
the writer on a certain day in the nave of West- 
minster Abbey. He showed it to his wife, laugh- 
ingly, and threw it aside. Shortly afterward he 
received another letter in the same handwriting,' 
and without opening it thrust it into a pocket of 
his coat. There it was found, and handed to him 
by his valet. He opened it, when out fell a £1,000 
Bank-of -England note. Naturally enough he ex- 
amined the letter which came to him so hand- 
somely recommended. It proved to be from an 
elderly lady who lamented his failure to come to 



BEACONSFIELD. 147 

the Abbey, expressed her earnest desire to make 
him her heir, and begged only that she might see 
and speak with him while she yet lived. The re- 
sult was a visit regularly paid to Mrs. Wyllyams 
twice a year for several years, a will making Mr. 
Disraeli her heir, and an agreement on his part 
that she should be laid at rest after her death 
among the Disraelis at Hughenden. 

" Not much more is known of Mrs. Brydges- 
Wyllyams, though the family is rather a conspic- 
uous one in Cornwall, where one of its members 
led a Liberal attack on a Conservative seat only 
the other day in vain. It is her sole and doubt- 
less, as she would have considered, her all-suffi- 
cient record. She was of no great mark in life, 
but she took measures to attain in death to a kind 
of companionship with one who, in her opinion, 
was the greatest man of his age. One is tempted 
to think that she must have judged him rightly, 
if only because he inspired such devotion. This 
verdict of a woman's worship is, in some sort, 
more convincing than that of the bellicose enthu- 
siasm of the mob. And it was no solitary in- 
stance, as we are reminded by a glance at the 
central compartment of turf, where lies that 
* Viscountess Beaconsfield in her own right,' 
whose devotion to the present solitary bearer of 
the title was as touching and as romantic as any- 
thing in mediaeval romance. The fortune left 
her by her first husband gave the second one the 



148 BEACONSFIELD. 

means of pusMng his way in tlie political world. 
He lost the use of it at her death under the terms 
of Mr. Wyndham Lewis's will ; and, in spite of 
the timely legacy of Mrs. Brydges-Wyllyams, he 
is at this moment, to his honor be it said, almost 
a poor man — certainly anything but a rich one. 
Before his late return to power he was one of the 
few ex-Premiers of England who have felt them- 
selves obliged to accept the allowance of £2,000 a 
year, to which they are entitled when out of office. 
Disraeli has always sought fortune in the higher 
sense of glory and fame ; and when it has come 
to him as pelf it has been by the pure favor of 
the goddess and not by his own exertions. His 
life-long devotion to his wife would be enough to 
prove, were any one impertinent enough to doubt 
it, that her jointure was not her attraction in his 
eyes. ' They was like a pair of turtle-doves, 
they was,' says the head gardener as he shows 
you through the shrubberies, cultivated by her 
constant care to suit her husband's taste. ' They 
was like that to the last day of their lives. They 
would spend whole days out here together in the 
summer time, and it was her delight to take him 
to see things which she had done to please him 
unbeknown. If she thought he'd like to have a 
clearer view of the meadows she'd have openings 
cut in the woods. She used to tell me to do it on 
the quiet, and when it was all done she'd lead 
him to the spot. Do you see that monnyment 



BEACONSFIELD. 149 

yonder on the hill ? Well, it's put up in memory 
of my lord's father, him that wrote the book ; 
and my lady did it all of her own accord. She 
had the plans made and set the masons to work 
without sayin' a word to him about it ; and then 
she takes him out one fine afternoon, and says he, 
" What's that ? " " Let's go see," says she, with 
a smile ; and when they got near it he stood and 
looked at her for a full minute without speakin' 
a word. I've heerd as how he cried, but not bav- 
in' been near enough to see it I can't say. It was 
the finished monnyment to Isaac Disraeli, sir, fit 
for Westminster Abbey. She loved Isaac Dis- 
raeli's son like that.' As you listen to this you 
cannot but call to mind many another story on 
the same subject equally to the point. Men may 
dispute as to the value of power and of titles. 
Looking at the price he has paid for them, in this 
his desolate evening of life. Lord Beaconsfield 
may himself doubt their value ; but who will 
deny that the man has been happy who has been 
so deeply loved ? " 



XX. 

It may be said of Disraeli, as he once said of 
Peel, that " he is one of the greatest ' members of 
Parliament' of the present century." There is 



150 BEACONSFIELD. 

no doubt tliat he lias shown himself a great party- 
leader. The qualities that have made him so have 
been manifold, and have acted in a happy combi- 
nation. A great lesson of his life has been its il- 
lustration of the almost boundless power of indom- 
itable pluck. The patience, the temper, the per- 
severance, the contempt of reverse, of obstacle, of 
difficulty, of the most obstinate prejudice with 
which a man ever had to contend, which his ca- 
reer has betrayed, have made him the irresistible 
chief of a compact and submissive party organiza- 
tion, which acts not only with the discipline but 
with the precision and force of an army. 

He became a great party leader, not by jug- 
glery, but by the patience with which he awaited 
his opportunity, by the excellent temper with 
which he dealt with his colleagues, with the rank 
and file of his party, and even with his antago- 
nists ; by his conspicuous skill in debate, by his 
power as an orator, by his boldness in timely at- 
tack, and by his equal boldness in timely retreat ; 
by his almost invariably wise plan of parliamen- 
tary campaign, by his constant encouragement 
given to the young and promising men of his 
political connection, and by the almost inexhausti- 
ble fertility of his resources in party warfare. 

Gladstone became the leader of a united Lib- 
eral party ; he has managed to divide, distract, 
and almost destroy it. Disraeli found the Tory 
party on the verge of chaos, split in two by the 



BEACONSFIELD. 151 

course of Sir Robert Peel on the corn laws. He 
has given it unity, strength, compactness, and a 
very palpable and lasting power. Little more can 
be said for Canning, Grey, Peel, Kussell, or Pal- 
merston, or even Pitt, as party chiefs. 

" To him," says a close observer, " belongs the 
honor of having, with an exquisite tact and skill, 
led the House of Commons, when he had only a 
minority of supporters at his back, and of having 
led it in such a way that the most watchful of 
foes was unable to trip him up, or even to change 
the secretly-formed purpose of his mind. 

" Those who saw him first as Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, then as Prime-Minister during the last 
Conservative administration, leading his party and 
the House of Commons at the same time, witnessed 
a spectacle the like of which has perhaps never 
been seen before ; for we have no previous record 
of such generalship as that which Disraeli then 
displayed. 

" The wi'iter, while watching him during that 
eventful period, was, curiously enough, constantly 
reminded of a line in Cowper's well-known hymn; 
for, if ever a man seemed to ' ride upon the storm ' 
of party politics, to be above it, and superior to its 
fury, it was Disraeli. 

" Once and again there was mutiny in the ranks 
of his own party : as a minister, he could have 
cried with the Psalmist against his own familiar 
friend in whom he trusted ; opposite to him was 



152 " BEACONSFIELD. 

a foe bent upon miscHef, superior to him in num- 
bers, and led by a man wbo, with many great and 
noble qualities of his own, had never once during 
a long career been betrayed into the weakness of 
an act savoring of tenderness toward his brilliant 
rival. 

" From this man Disraeli had to look for noth- 
ing but the most uncompromising and relentless 
opposition — and he knew it. He was himself en- 
gaged in a task which, to the most sanguine of 
followers, had but a short time before seemed an 
utterly hopeless one, and which to those of them 
who were unable to see as far as he did, seemed 
worse than hopeless — suicidal. 

" But he went on, in spite of difficulties and 
discouragements which would have broken the 
spirit and destroyed the strength of any other 
party leader of modern times. And he went on 
with wonderful success. Past rocks and shoals, 
and quicksands without number, and by a chan- 
nel on which it had never before entered, he 
steered the vessel of the state ; he faced obstacles 
which seemed insurmountable, and which to any 
other man would have been what they seemed, and 
lo ! they vanished under his marvelous manipula- 
tion ; with a party sorely reduced in strength, he 
kept at bay the overwhelming numbers of the 
enemy — nay, he even used them as instruments of 
his own, and it was by their aid that he passed 
the great measure which will henceforth be asso- 



BEACONSFIELD. 153 

ciated witli his name, and balked his eager rivals. 
This is what Disraeli has accomplished within the 
last few years ; and no impartial man will deny 
that it is one of the greatest political achieve- 
ments recorded in the history of Parliament. 

" It was during the trying period between 
1866-'69 that he developed his ripest powers. 
Until he became leader of the House of Commons 
on the last occasion, he had never shown his re- 
markable fitness for such a post. On previous oc- 
casions, he had done well ; but then he did his 
work superlatively well. It is true that, when he 
had formerly been leader of the House, he had 
labored under the disadvantage of having opposed 
to him the skilled veteran who was the most pop- 
ular party man ever seated within the walls of 
Parliament. 

"There is but one instance which need be 
quoted to show that he does possess in a very high 
degree the foresight and the accuracy of judg- 
ment which are necessary to make a man a really 
great statesman. IsTeed we say that we allude to 
the question of the American War ? Upon that 
topic we were nearly all in the wrong — all but 
Disraeli. Lord Palmerston — clever, experienced, 
worldly-wise old man as he was — would have gone 
in unhesitatingly for a recognition of the Southern 
States. Earl Russell declared that we saw in the 
New World that which we had so often seen in 
the Old — a war on the one side for empire, and 



154 BEACONSFIELD. 

on the other side for independence. Mr. Glad- 
stone was bursting with zeal — even when official 
restraints ought to have tied his tongue — on be- 
half of Mr. Davis, and *the nation he had made.' 
" Disraeli was in opposition, and therefore at 
liberty to act entirely in accordance with his own 
sympathies ; his party were almost to a man the 
enthusiastic adherents of the South. It would 
have seemed, to an ordinarily acute person, that 
the safest and most profitable game he could pos- 
sibly have played would have been that of the 
Confederacy. But Disraeli himself knew better. 
A cool judgment and a clear foresight had led him 
to see the inevitable end. He was beyond his owii 
party, beyond his colleagues, beyond his rivals, in 
the prescience which enabled him to see what the 
results of the American War would be ; and, 
while we believe that this statesman-like sagacity 
did much to save England at the time from im- 
measurable evils, we cannot but deplore the fact 
that those who are put forward as his superiors in 
statesmanship did not in this instance show that 
they possessed it in something like the same de- 
'gree." 

XXI. 

Closely allied to his unrivaled sway as a 
party chief, are Disraeli's versatile gifts as a par- 
liamentary debater and orator. In the art of 



BEACONSFIELD. 155 

eloquence he is as full of surprises, of sudden and 
striking turns, of dazzling flashes and dramatic 
climaxes, as his public career has displayed in 
action and conduct. 

" Lord Derby," says Ritchie, " has been called 
the Rupert of debate ; but the term is more ap- 
plicable to Disraeli. When you exj)ect him to 
speak he has nothing to say ; when you do not 
exjiect him he is on his legs ; when you think he 
will go on for another hour he sits down as rap- 
idly as he gets up. He delights in surprises, and 
you cannot tell which is the studied effort and 
which the impromptu retort. 

" As an orator, Disraeli stands by himself. It 
is not English — that elaborately dressed form ; 
that pale Hebrew face, shaded with curling hair, 
once luxuriant and dark ; that style, so melo- 
dramatic, yet so effective ; that power of individ- 
uality which makes you hate the object of his 
hate ; that passion which you scarce know wheth- 
er to call malignant or sublime. When he rises 
it is needless for the Sj)eaker to announce his 
name. A glance at the orator, with his glistening 
vest, tells you that the great advocate of the pure 
Semitic race is on his legs. . . . Immediately you 
lean forward. In his face there is a dazzling, 
saucy look which at once excites your interest. 
You see that if he is not a great man he is an in- 
tensely clever one, and you feel that as an orator 
he has few rivals. When he soars, as he occasion- 



156 BEACONSFIELD. 

ally does, you tremble lest he should break down ; 
but Disraeli never attempts more than he can 
achieve, and when nearest to bathos, he saves 
himself by a happy flight. But even in his high- 
est efforts he aims at a doggedly cool and uncon- 
cerned appearance, and will stop to suck an or- 
ange, or actually, as he did in his great budget 
speech, to cut his nails. It is true there are times 
when he looks more emotional. On that memo- 
rable December morning when he was ousted from 
his chancellorship, when his party were inglori- 
ously driven from the Eden where they had hoped 
long 

' To live and lie reclined 
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind,' 

back into the bleak and desert world, Disraeli 
came out of the House at half -past five a. m., gay 
and fresh as if the majority had been with him, 
not against him. There was an unwonted buoy- 
ancy in his walk, and sparkle in his eye ; but the 
excitement of the contest was hardly over — the 
swell of the storm was there still— still rang in his 
ears the thunders of applause, audible in the lobby, 
which greeted his daring retorts and audacious 
personalities." 

Another witness to many of his forensic ex- 
hibitions in the House of Commons declares that 
" no speaker can be more effective than he is in 
making his * points.' His by-play, as the actors 



BEACONSFIELD. 157 

call it, is perfect ; and to Ms sneers and sarcasms 
he gives the fullest force by the most subtile mod- 
ulation of his voice, by transient expressions of 
the features, and the inimitable shrug ; and, while 
the House is convulsed by the laughter which he 
has raised at an adversary's expense, he himself 
usually remains as apparently unmoved and im- 
passive as if he were not an actor in the scenCo" 

"It is the parrot-cry of those who criticise 
Disraeli's character," says another, "to say that, 
despite his wonderful genius, he is incapable of 
appreciating the peculiarities — the weaknesses, if 
you will — of the character of the average English 
gentleman. What better answer can there be to this 
charge, so constantly brought against him, than 
to point to the way in which he has made himself 
master of the greatest weakness of the House of 
Commons — its love of A good laugh ? During his 
premiership, despite all that there was to worry 
and annoy him, he kept the House of Commons 
in good temper by his constant use of an unflag-. 
ging and unfailing humor. 

" He put down bores, or he silenced awkward 
questions, with one of those happy phrases or 
pleasant jests which Lord Palmer ston loved so 
dearly, and which did so much to smooth the path 
of that great statesman while he was at the head 
of affairs. It seems a very small thing, this abil- 
ity to cope successfully with the bores of the 
House of Commons ; but no one who has studied 



158 BEACONSFIELD. 

the science of party government will regard it 
with contempt. 

" Disraeli is perhaps never so happy as when 
he is putting down one of those terrible children 
of Parliament who icill know everything, and who 
vnll ask their questions, or air their most recently- 
acquired knowledge at the most inappropriate 
moment. Who, for instance, has forgotten the 
way in which he met Mr. Darby Griffith, when 
that honorable gentleman had put a question 
which looked like ' a poser ? ' 

"Among the bores, Mr. Griffith is, or rather 
was, facile princeps ; and at times, by the very 
perseverance of his boring, he has wormed some 
secrets out of unwilling governments. 

" But when Disraeli, instead of giving him the 
information for which he asked, got up, and, in 
that airy, off-hand manner that sits so well upon 
him, congratulated the member for Devizes upon 
the possession of a ' luminous intellect,' the House 
was so delighted with the saying that it gave the 
minister full liberty to sit down, and leave Mr. 
Griffith to digest the unexpected compliment — if 
he could. 

" Somewhat akin to this humor is that higher 
power of sarcasm for which Disraeli has been 
famous throughout his whole public life. He is 
not, in one sense of the word, a good debater. It 
cannot be denied that at times he contrasts un- 
favorably with Mr. Gladstone. But upon some 



BEACONSFIELD. 159 

subjects lie makes speeches which are far above 
the level reached by any other man in the House 
of Commons. No one has the power of investing 
a great political event with more of the interest 
attaching to domestic affairs than he has. 

" Over and over again he has brought down 
incidents, which were so far above the ordinary 
level of the House of Commons as to be beyond 
the reach of its sympathy, to the region of every- 
day life — as, for instance, in the case of Mr. Lin- 
coln's assassination, when he made the speech of 
all the speeches made the world over upon that 
most terrible and most touching of tragedies, and 
brought tears into the eyes of men to whom, be- 
fore that moment, the President of the United 
States had been a mere abstraction. 

" But, while upon such topics he is a perfect 
master of words and ideas, when he is speaking 
upon the mere party question of the hour, he 
often fails to produce that impression upon his 
audience which one would expect from a man of 
his genius. No doubt many causes unite to pro- 
duce this effect. 

" Chief among them, we believe, is the fact 
that he has not the passion of the ordinary party 
man. The range of his sympathies is so catholic, 
that his mind is seldom roused to passion upon a 
question which is only a question of party ; it is 
not until he is really touched by one of those few 
topics which have power to move him deeply. 



160 BEACONSFIELD. 

that the fire of genius in Ms soul pours forth its 
sparks, and that he shows all the depths of passion 
and enthusiasm hidden within him. And yet, 
even when he is in his coldest mood, what an in- 
tellectual treat it is to listen to him speaking upon 
one of the great questions of the day ! 

" A few years ago the Times contemptuously 
spoke of his speech on the Irish Church bill — in 
opposing it upon the second reading — as ' flimsy 
covered with spangles.' That may have been the 
impression produced upon the gentleman who 
wrote the Times leader, but we can bear testi- 
mony to the fact that it was not the impression 
produced upon the House of Commons. 

" In making that speech, Disraeli labored 
under many disadvantages — disadvantages so ob- 
vious that we need not. recur to them — ^yet his 
speech was one which drew shouts of applause 
from those who had least sympathy with the 
cause on behalf of which he was pleading. From 
beginning to end it sparkled — with ' spangles,' if 
it pleases the Times to say so — ^but, at any rate, 
with spangles the brilliancy of which dazzled the 
beholders, and roused new admiration within them 
for the speaker. 

"We have made the fullest allowance for a 
fact which is obvious to those who have studied 
Disraeli's career in the House of Commons — the 
fact, namely, that upon many party questions he 
is not so successful in the effect he produces by 



BEACONSFIELD. 161 

his speeches as might be expected ; but no one 
will deny that the speeches themselves are among 
the most remarkable specimens of parliamentary- 
eloquence which the present generation has wit- 
nessed. Their cleverness is unsurpassed. 

" And even the most jealous of rivals, or the 
most censorious of critics, will be ready to admit 
that in sarcasm and in wit he is also unapproached 
by any politician of the present day. We said 
that his sarcasm was akin to the humor he shows 
in putting down bores. It is, indeed, a humorous 
rather than a venomous sarcasm, bringing smiles 
even to the faces of those who are wincing under 
its shafts. 

"No one can watch him upon an occasion 
on which his sarcastic powers are evoked, with- 
out being lost in admiration at the skill he dis- 
plays. He flings about his wonderfully polished 
epigrams with the careless grace of an Eastern 
magician flinging knives at one of his confeder- 
ates — with this difference, however, that whereas 
the magician always misses, he always hits. He 
meets a whole broadside of invective with a sin- 
gle thrust of his rapier-like wit, and lo ! his oppo- 
nent is laid prostrate on the ground. 

" He compliments Mr. Beresford Hope, when 
that gentleman is most emphatic in denouncing 
him, upon * the Bat avian grace ' of his style ; he 
remarks parenthetically, after the most cutting 
onslaught of Lord Salisbury, that *the noble 
11 



IQ2 BEAOONSFIELD. 

lord's invective possesses vigor, but it has one de- 
fect — it lacks finish ; ' he sends Mr. Goldwin 
Smith to roam over the world labeled * an itiner- 
ant spouter of stale sedition ; ' he shuts the mouth 
of a noisy and demonstrative assailant like Mr. 
Sergeant Dowse by a passing allusion to his * jo- 
vial profligacy ; ' and among the leaders of the 
Liberal party there is not one who has not been 
made the subject of a happy epigram, polished to 
the fineness of a needle, which at the time it was 
tossed across the House with an airy, graceful in- 
difference, never failed to reach its mark, and to 
strike home. ISTor is it only in meeting assailants 
that he deals in epigrams. The national debt is ' a 
mere flea-bite ; ' the Derby is ' the blue ribbon of 
the turf ; ' nay, there are a hundred happy phrases 
now in every-day use among us, for which we are 
indebted to the leader of the Opposition." 

We cannot more appropriately bring this lit- 
tle volume to a close than by quoting the eloquent 
words of the same writer, casting a rapid eye 
over Disraeli's whole career, and estimating his 
fame in England as it will appear in the days 
when he and his generation shall have passed 
away : 

" He has played a great part in the history of 
the country, and, on the whole, has played it well ; 
while, as for his personal career, his struggle from 
comparative poverty and obscurity to the greatest 
height which it is possible for a subject to attain, 



BEACONSFIELD. 163 

and the qualities whicli, during that struggle, he 
has displayed, his resolution and endurance in de- 
feat, his generosity and moderation in victory — 
these are things for which every man must feel 
the most genuine sympathy and admiration, 
whose sympathy and admiration are worth pos- 
sessing. His career is a romance ; but it is a 
romance that teaches a thousand useful and noble 
lessons, and that will have power, in times when 
the party passions of to-day shall be cold as the 
ashes of those by whom they are fanned, to fire 
many a young soul with the highest ambition, 
and to fill many a tender heart with the sympathy 
for him whose story it records." 



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